Beyond Vyond -- why AI talking head cartoon videos are more distracting than a static image

A while back my stakeholders came to me asking for one of those PowToon/ Vyond talking AI cartoon explainer video things. I had some time at the outset of the project to generate three different options to see which would meet the project requirements best. In the end, they preferred a nice-looking static photo of the speaker rather than a cartoon talking head or an AI video-generated avatar. Why? *The Uncanny Valley.* A human face that looks fake and moves unnaturally is more distracting than a static image, which interferes with your eLearning content. I wrote this reflection then:

https://tedcurran.net/2025/01/ai-video-explainers-and-the-uncanny-valley/

The situation arose again this week where I had to explain to someone why a Vyond is a worse option than a nice-looking static shot of each speaker animated slightly within a video editing interface (like a Ken Burns effect).

In Kevin Cheng’s book “See What I Mean”, he advocates for using less-detailed representations of people wherever possible. The brain (as we see above) is very good at filling in the details of a simple line drawing of a face. As the representation gets more detailed, it also takes up more of your brain’s attention that we ideally want to be directing to the content being learned.

For this reason, I think it’s a best practice to default to less-distracting representations of speakers, even low-tech static images, rather than AI-generated avatars. I would even say that low-quality video of a real person is better than high-quality AI video of a dead-eyed talking robot head.