Let me see if I have this right. Bob Dylan—the Bob Dylan, who spent his entire career raging against commercialism, who went electric at Newport and told the folk purists to shove it, who wrote Like a Rolling Stone as a middle finger to everyone who wanted him to stay in his lane—is now selling AI-generated historical fan fiction on Patreon for five bucks a month.
I need a minute.
The project is called Lectures From The Grave, and it features «letters never sent» from historical figures like Mark Twain, plus audio «lectures» allegedly from Confederate soldier Frank James, Vice President Aaron Burr, and Wild Bill Hickok. The poster art and audio recordings appear to have been created using AI, though Dylan's team hasn't officially confirmed that.
Look, I get it. The man is 84 years old. He sold his entire song catalog to Universal Music for something north of $300 million. He's been on the Never Ending Tour since before most people knew what streaming was. If anyone has earned the right to coast into weird old age doing whatever the hell strikes his fancy, it's Bob Dylan.
But this isn't just weird—it's cognitively dissonant. This is the guy who made a career out of being aggressively, defiantly analog. Who refused to explain his lyrics because he believed art should speak for itself. Who turned down the Nobel Prize ceremony because he had better things to do (or so he claimed).
And now he's... content farming? With AI? On Patreon?
According to AV Club, the first post is just a video of Mahalia Jackson performing on The Ed Sullivan Show—something you can already watch for free on YouTube, by the way. The rest is a hodgepodge of curated historical ephemera and what sounds like ChatGPT doing its best impression.
