Worth pointing out, over at sister site Gamasutra - the just-posted feature called 'Uncanny AI: Artificial Intelligence In The Uncanny Valley', which looks at the almost-realistic theory of strange CG humans from a behavior point of view, too.

How so? Well, author David Hayward makes some great, lyrical points on why AI can just be... scary: "There's a small minority of people who are consistently strange in particular ways. You've probably met a few of them. Human though they are, interaction with them doesn't follow the usual dance of eye contact, facial expressions, intonations, gestures, conversational beats, and so forth. For most, it can be disconcerting to interact with such people. Often, it's not their fault, but even so the most extreme of them can seem spooky, and are sometimes half jokingly referred to as monstrous or robotic."

Ah yes, those people! Hayward continues: "I don't mean to pick on them as a group; nearly all of us dip into such behavior sometimes, perhaps when we're upset, out of sorts, or drunk. Relative and variable as our social skills are, AI is nowhere near such a sophisticated level of interactive ability. It is, however, robotic. Monstrous and sometimes unintentionally comedic; the intersection of broken AI and spooky people is coming."