(scraping)
- Oh, that's cool, it's music.
- You actually have to tune it
to get the right amount of annoying noise.
- Sounds like a nice pitch to me.
So most people find this annoying?
- I think they do, yeah.
After a little while.
- Oh that's perfect.
- Yeah.
(scraping)
- Dude, I seriously want to collaborate
on an album with you.
I'm Judah Friedlander
and I'm challenging the world's top
artificial intelligence robots
for the sake of humanity.
This is Judah vs The Machines.
I'm here in Berkeley, California
in front of a house that is filled with
100% pure robotic evil.
(horror music) (evil laughing)
- Alex Reben, remember the name.
Roboticist, artist.
Lives here and he's got a robot that can paint.
I will challenge it.
I will win even though I believe art
should never be contest and should never be judged.
Never trust a charming, Victorian home.
You never know if it's actually
a haunted robo mansion.
(dramatic orchestral music)
- Hello Alex.
- Hello, how are ya?
- Good to meet ya!
- Judah, good to meet ya, Alex.
- Welcome!
- Now tell me, you have some robot that draws and paints?
What does it do?
- The one you'll be competing against,
there will be a picture of a model
and we'll run it through an algorithm
that tries to make it a bit more human-like.
So, it's a computer-learning algorithm
that learned art from different artists
and it takes an image and applies
that style to that image so it makes
things look like Starry Night for example.
- Doesn't sound very original, if you ask me.
- It's, well think about it.
- It's not really thinking, right?
(intense music)
- That's a toy truck that has actual truck air horns.
It's a floating brick.
- [Judah] I love it.
- [Alex] His name is Jackson.
He makes abstract expressionist paintings.
- I don't get the connection.
- No?
The infamous finger bleed robot.
- It may make a finger bleed or it may not.
- Right.
- Issac Asimov's three laws of robotics.
Law number one is a robot may not injure a human being.
- That is a knife attached to a robot.
- Or through inaction,
allow a human being to come to harm.
- It's your classic stabbing sort of thing.
- Stab one right there.
Did you not like his books or?
- Right now, it's pretty easy to see
that I built that robot that makes someone bleed.
Am I in control of it?
Do I make that decision?
- Yeah.
- So who's really?
- Dude, I would blame it on the robot.
Talking doesn't really work,
but if I'm yelling it's pretty cool!
You're the first person I've ever met
who's doing something productive with robotics.
- [Alex] It's all pretty mechanical but it appears--
- [Judah] It's just a ball with a vibrating thing in it?
- Yep.
It likes to go wherever there is least resistance.
I guess like most people.
Headphones that remove people's ability to speak
by feeding back their voice into their ears.
You start stuttering.
- To me, it just sounds like you're turning Russian.
- Yeah, the thing that's interesting about this is--
- Oh, nice dude!
- Yeah, that's--
- Does that feel hot?
- Yeah.
- You have good hair, dude.
- So in this challenge
you're gonna meet Seurat-bot
who's gonna make a pointillism portrait
of our model here.
- Sir-robot?
- Seurat, like the Pointillism painter.
Robot, all together.
So I'm gonna take a picture with my camera,
email it to the robot,
the robot's gonna run it through
that deep-style algorithm
and it's gonna convert it into
Pointillism style and then start drawing it.
- I don't need email to do art, I just don't.
- [Alex] Okay.
- Did you take the picture already?
- No, I'm working, I'm going here.
And...
Go.
The robot's starting to process the picture.
(light piano music)
(Judah hums)
- What color are your eyes?
- [Model] Green.
- Yeah.
- You are using black ink, if I am correct.
(light music)
- [Judah] They brought in an art critic
to analyze our portraits and declare a winner,
because art is all about
the subjective opinion of one person.
So which one do you like better of these two?
- Well.
This one looks like somebody famous.
And this one doesn't.
So let's see.
This one I find a little bit disturbing.
Looking at it again, this one is smoother and cleaner.
It doesn't have that kind of raw sensuality.
This one isn't really part of reality.
This is kind of abstract.
- Mm-hmm.
- This is--
- [Judah] Kind of impressionist?
- Kind of impressionist, yeah.
- Maybe even its own new genre.
- Mm-hmm.
- [Alex] Which one is your final decision, which one?
- Well this one is kinda tessellated.
- Maybe take a step back a bit
and take a different perspective.
- That's actually a good idea.
- Yeah, I think I like this one better.
- [Alex] Yeah?
Okay, congratulations.
Team Human is the winner.
- I'll tell you something,
I've met a lot of great professors over the years,
but none as quality as yourself.
(scraping)
- Another victory for Team Human.
I think I'm gonna move in here.
It's about time I downsized to a smaller house.
This fork music machine is awesome.
Just play this all day.
So excited to just chill out here, relax.
Go to sleep with this beautiful music machine.
Alex, I'm moving in buddy!
- [Alex] Sounds good!
(pop music)