Five of them have been created by a human

and one of them has been created by a machine.

Which one is the machine-made piece of art?

We're gonna take a vote.

The first one, the second one, the third one, the fourth,

the fifth and the sixth.

No one got it right.

NARRATOR: The School of Life is sending some of YouTube's most popular creators

on a series of field trips

to explore some of philosophy's most intriguing ideas.

This time, it's Luzu,

a Spanish content creator who built a global reputation

playing online video games

and now has over eight million subscribers.

Advances in artificial intelligence

are blurring the lines between humans and machines.

And now robots are encroaching on the last remaining area

that we thought was uniquely human.

The power to be creative.

I'm Luzu. Or am I?

The one thing that I keep thinking about is,

as we give these machines human-like attributes,

what does that mean

when it comes to our identity as humans?

This is such a big subject,

we need a little guide before we start.

NARRATOR: A 60-second guide to identity.

For most of human history,

the difference between humans and machines was very clear.

A machine was something clever but simple,

whereas humans were miraculous creatures of astonishing potential.

But very recently, something extraordinary has happened.

We've started to make machines that equal and outstrip many of our own capacities.

This has created a troubling question.

What is left that makes us distinctively human?

One important answer is the ability to create.

Machines might be better at predicting the weather,

or even beat us at chess,

but surely they'll never be able to generate amazing art.

In 1950, Alan Turing, the founding father of computer science,

proposed a test.

When a human can no longer tell

if they are interacting with a person or a machine,

we will have lost the one last quality

that distinguishes us from machines.

So, when we can no longer tell

the difference between art made by machines

and art made by humans,

what would be left to mark us out as unique?

Might as soon be nothing at all

that we can do that a machine won't be able to do just as well?

Or, most frighteningly of all, much, much better.

Machine learning is now challenging

our very concept of what makes humans unique.

We're comfortable with robots performing basic skills

that we don't want to do ourselves,

but in this video,

Luzu was looking at AIs that create art

before facing a test, along with you,

to see if he can correctly identify art

created by a machine

when it's up against art created by humans.

But first, what does life look like on the AI frontline?

Hi, there. I'm Luzu. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, too. How are you?

I'm great. Thanks for asking.

NARRATOR: This robot is called NAO.

It looks a bit like a toy,

but, actually, it's a WiFi enabled, autonomous AI

who listens through sensors and gathers information from online sources,

teaching itself through a continuous process of machine learning.

NAO gives an eerie sense of how the border

between human and machine is becoming more porous.

-I need to learn some lines. -[EXCLAIMS]

-Don't distract me. -Oh.

I'm here trying to figure out what it means to be human.

Do you know anything about that?

Absolutely. We robots are evolving quickly

and taking on more and more of your human characteristics.

We have been able to carry out straightforward tasks,

but recently we have begun to educate ourselves.

It's called machine learning.

Think I'm gonna want to research

and learn a little bit more about that.

NARRATOR: We humans think of ourselves as the undisputed masters of the universe,

but that confidence is now being challenged

as advances in machine learning

close the gap between what humans and computers can do.

There is one area where we feel certain

that we do still retain a unique distinction.

Only humans have the power to be creative.

But what if even that skill

could be performed by a machine?

Before being tested on his ability to spot the art created by an AI,

Luzu's on his way to UCLA,

where an AI is teaching itself

to create an original artwork.

So, this is one of the projects I wanted to show you.

The concept is really to teach a machine

to create a single portrait

from this vast number of individual portraits.

And then asking it to generate its own portrait from that.

LUZU: The machine creates something original, right?

It's not just imitating everything,

it's creating something from scratch.

GABBY: So, there's two parts of the algorithm,

one of them generates an image and the other one

criticizing it and gives a little bit

of feedback and says, "Actually,

"you need to make it a little bit smaller,

"or put a bit of red in this area and try again."

So, as the process goes on, it's getting better and better.

So, this shows the process of evolution,

where on the left we got some of

the early imagery that's generated by the machine

and it starts to become more and more

kind of recognizable as one of the portraits from the set.

But it still has a very painterly, slightly abstract,

slightly Impressionistic feel.

But this was just running for 24 hours.

Makes me think a little bit of

how a baby learning what a person is.

The machine is right now doing the same thing.

The machine learning processes are so similar

to our own learning processes and our creative processes.

That you start to see that kind of invention

and creativity happening.

I think in the same way that has been happening within humans.

So, the machine's kind of going through that process

at an accelerated rate.

NARRATOR: It's one thing for machines to create original art,

but is it any good?

AI company GumGum is putting art made by machines

up against art made by humans

to see if Luzu can tell which is which.

We're deeply interested in computer vision

and machine learning and we decided, why don't we try

a Turing test?

And see if humans can figure out

which one's artificially generated.

I know that art is very subjective

and something that we would attribute to, like, humans.

There's a lot of emotion, there's expression,

so how does a machine choose what it's gonna paint?

I mean, I can flip that back on you

and say, "How do you decide?"

-Is it based on data? -I guess...

Computers are more than capable of generating art

in any medium.

From all these paintings,

one was created by a machine?

That's right, yeah...

Any idea which one it might be?

So, it could be any of them, right?

Right. Which one is it?

NARRATOR: While Luzu ponders,

why don't you have a go?

Can you tell which one of these paintings

has been done by an AI?

Do you think it's one?

Two, three?

Four?

Five?

Or six?

If I had to take a guess,

I don't know a lot about art or anything like that,

but I think I would choose the first one.

Just because,

it looks a little bit more flat, right?

I don't know, it looks like something that

could be made by a machine.

It's like the randomness that a machine would...

Yeah, I imagine something like that.

-Like zeros and ones. -Yeah, kind of. [CHUCKLES]

Actually, it's this one.

LUZU: Okay, I was not expecting that.

The way that it works is actually by

taking images like this

and teaching it how to generate things of this nature.

And, eventually, after you feed it enough data,

you'll yield something that looks like this,

that passes a Turing test,

which actually blew my mind. I was so happy.

The definition of creativity is to create.

Doesn't say anything about being a human or a monkey or machine.

So, try and answer the question where this will end,

these things are just gonna keep getting bigger,

faster, stronger, better, and whether the data comes from us

or maybe they start learning from each other,

I think it's a limitless ceiling.

LUZU: Do you see that as a possible thing, we end up being the ones

-learning from? -Absolutely, and the fact that

you couldn't discern is a testament to that.

It validates the question.

NARRATOR: Until recently, machines from the oldest cameras

to the most modern digital scanners

have only been able to capture impressions of reality

created by humans.

Now, machines are doing something far more interesting.

They're developing distinctive artistic personalities

in the same way as Van Gogh, Picasso or Salvador Dali.

Machines can do simple, repetitive tasks like frying burgers,

and complex ones like beating us at chess.

But if it will soon be making art

good enough to hang in museums,

we may have to rethink what claims we can still make

to have any unique or distinctive qualities.

And decide whether to feel alarmed by

this threat to our concept of humanity,

or proud of having built machines that will soon be our equals.

Or perhaps even our betters.

Although they may not be quite ready

to replace us just yet.

[YELPS]

You were trying to go too far.

Like, I know I'm not that flexible, either.

[YELPS]

All right, I got you. Come on, my man.

-Come up, you got it? -[WHIRRING]

I think you got it.

Okay? You're almost there.

That was amazing.

Can you high five?

Not there yet? Okay.

Thank you, guys, so much for watching.

If you enjoyed it, what can they do?

Make sure you subscribe to the School of Life channel

to see the rest of the series.

Thank you, and thank you, guys, for watching.

[INDISTINCT CONVERSATION]