Machines That Fail Us - Season 2, Episode 4: Creative Machines: Rethinking Art with AI

In this episode, we deal with the impacts of generative AI on art and aestethics, looking at how the rise and commercial success of tools such as Dall-E, Midjourney, and Sora have raised profound questions in the art world, and especially when it comes to visual arts. AI is reshaping how art is created, experienced, and valued. In this episode, we explore the opportunities and challenges artists face in collaborating with algorithmic tools, the ethical and creative questions emerging from machine-generated content, and the implications for authorship, originality, and cultural production.On one hand, we’ll focus on how artists can, and already do, use generative AI tools, exploring the results of these collaborations so far and examining how they differ from other historical moments when technology intersected with art. On the other hand, we’ll address ongoing debates in this field, starting with AI errors and the outcomes often referred to as “hallucinations,” and moving on to more systemic issues such as copyright, labor, and the flood of AI-generated images online, commonly known as “AI slop.” Finally, we’ll try to imagine how humans and machines might coexist in the future and consider, through art, what life with these creative machines could look like.In this episode of Machines That Fail Us, we discuss these issues with Valentina Tanni, an art historian and curator studying the relationship between art and technology, with particular attention to web cultures. She is currently at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. In the past, she has also taught at La Sapienza University of Rome, the Polytechnic University of Milan, and NABA – New Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and Milan. She is the author of several books in this area: Memestetica. Il settembre eterno dell’arte (Nero, 2020); Exit Reality. Vaporwave, backrooms, weirdcore e altri paesaggi oltre la soglia (Nero, 2023); and her latest, Conversazioni con la macchina. Il dialogo dell’arte con le intelligenze artificiali (Tlon, 2025), which explicitly deals with the impact of generative AI on artistic practices. Her books have been translated into several languages and are distributed internationally.