Bob Dylan is selling AI-generated historical fan-fiction

After brief teases on his social media accounts, Bob Dylan announced via Instagram Stories yesterday that he’s launched a Patreon series, Lectures From The Grave, featuring “letters never sent” from the likes of Mark Twain, and “lectures” from America’s roughest and rowdiest: Confederate guerrilla soldier Frank James, 19th-century Vice President Aaron Burr, and Old West folk hero Wild Bill Hickok. The poster for the $5-per-month Patreon account, as well as audio recordings of the lectures, appear to have been created using AI. The Nobel Prize winner, nor his team, has yet to confirm if AI tools were used to make the images, audio, or stories. 

Why the 84-year-old musician has turned to AI-assisted historical fanfic is anyone’s guess. The letters, attributed to pseudonymous names and “curated by Bob Dylan” (as opposed, notably, to being written by him) are attributed to a cast of characters including “Herbert Foster” and “Marty Lombard.” The Patreon’s first post is just a video of Mahalia Jackson singing on The Ed Sullivan Show. If you don’t feel like coughing up a fiver, the clip is available on YouTube. In a letter by Foster, Mark Twain writes to silent film star Rudolph Valentino. “Dear Mr. Valentino, I take up my pen under circumstances that would puzzle the calendar and embarrass the undertaker, for I am told that both of us have already completed the respectable business of dying. Yet if letters can cross oceans, perhaps they may also cross that lesser boundary which divides the living from the historically inconvenienced.” 

Also published today is a story called “Bull Rider,” “written” by Lombard. It reads:

“The bus coughed me out somewhere past Amarillo, dust in my teeth and a sky that stretched out so wide it felt like it was laughing at me. I had a duffel bag, two shirts, a paperback of The Sea Wolf with the spine cracked like an old man’s knuckles, and the kind of hunger you don’t fix with food.