Surveys show a widening gap between expert and public views on AI with uncanny valley reactions now appearing as an ambient daily trigger. Pew Research Center's 2025 survey found 76% of AI experts expected personal benefit compared with 24% of the U.S. public while Quinnipiac's March 2026 poll recorded 55% of Americans saying AI would do more harm than good in daily life up from 44% in April 2025 (Pew Research Center 2025; Quinnipiac University 2026).

Masahiro Mori's 1970 paper tied revulsion to near-human but lifeless entities citing mismatch category ambiguity and pathogen-avoidance mechanisms; the Local Scribe post applies this directly to conversational chatbots synthetic voices and near-passing video that repeatedly invite then violate social expectations (Mori 1970; Local Scribe 2026). A 2025 virtual-agent study reinforced the disgust and danger-avoidance accounts originally noted in Mori's graph (Virtual Agents Study 2025).

Original coverage under-reported how repeated cross-modal exposure shifts transient startle into stable category distrust unlike single-robot tests and missed historical parallels to GMO and automation backlashes that similarly mixed economic fear with bodily aversion thereby accelerating regulatory pressure on transparency and human-likeness limits seen in the EU AI Act.