---
title: "Uncanny Ridge"
description: "Coined in the Cognitive Infrastructures studio as the inverse of Mori's uncanny valley."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/uncanny-ridge"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/uncanny-ridge"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Uncanny Ridge

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/uncanny-ridge), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Coined in the Cognitive Infrastructures studio as the inverse of Mori's uncanny valley. Where the valley is a trough of discomfort, the ridge is "a peak of interactional intensity" — the zone where intentional misrecognition between heterogeneous systems (models, agents, humans) reorganizes intelligibility rather than breaking it, producing perspectival novelty. Its foil is the *canny valley*: hyper-convergence between user expectation and model output, the aesthetic collapse caused by RLHF mode collapse and CLIP guidance. The paper proposes an *uncanny index* — the expected change in Bayesian surprise under an interaction protocol versus a null-protocol counterfactual — to locate the ridge empirically. Distinct from the journal's *inverse uncanny valley*, which is about seeing oneself estranged through machine eyes.

## Appears in

- [Traversing the Uncanny Ridge: Searching for Novelty in Intersystemic Communication](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/traversing-the-uncanny-ridge) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._