Uncanny valley: What’s the latest TikTok makeup trend?

How life-like should robots and AI be before they become scary? That question is at the heart of this phenomenon.

Pasty skin, empty eyes and slightly misshapen features against delirious music tracks – it’s the recent TikTok trend with a dose of disconcerting strangeness.

Generally called the uncanny valley makeup trend, it involves creators using makeup to appear as hyper-realistic bots. Some of the videos under this trend have received up to 13 million likes on the platform.

Pop culture has long assigned fear factors and untrustworthiness to robots, from Terminator in 1984, to Ex Machina in 2014. But today, the line between what’s real and what isn’t is increasing in a world of AI deep fakes and social humanoid robots.

Here is what we know about the trend.