Why is Bob Dylan hawking AI-generated historical fiction?!

As if to prove his point, the Nobel-winning mage who wrote “the times, they are a-changing,” has finally joined Patreon.

As Pitchfork reported yesterday, Bob Dylan—aka Zimmy, Blind Boy Grunt, Lucky Wilbury—has made a new personal account on the pay-to-play hosting service. From which hub he intends to spout strange musings straight to his public, for the low low price of $5 a month.

Dylan soft-launched the site this week via Instagram, spotlighting a series called “Lectures From the Grave.”

Billed as “a living archive,” this section features reports like “The Last Testament of Frank James,” “Aaron Burr: On the Art of Survival,” and “The Life and Death of Wild Bill.” All allegedly original stories from bygone folk heroes.

But wait, there’s more! As Nina Corcoran noted yesterday, there’s something a little off about ye olde lecture series. Despite the fact that old-timey Americana is generally on brand for old Jack Frost.

The audio essays from former Vice Presidents and outlaws, “which range from 15 minutes to 67 minutes in runtime, appear to be read out loud by an AI voice.” (Italics mine.)

Beyond the audio content, Bob’s Patreon also includes the first entry of a series called “Letters Never Sent,” and a single short story. The letter is an imagined message from Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino. It’s attributed to a writer named Herbert Foster.

Here we do well to note that all writing on this Patreon is framed as “curated by” Bob Dylan, as opposed to the standard “written.” Which language attests that it ain’t Bob, babe.

The seven page story, “Bull Rider”—credited to a Marty Lombard—is another case in point. This one follows an aspiring bull-rider, but the prose is a little left-of-center for the Bard As any Dylanologist could tell you.

Here’s an excerpt:

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.

We might spy some standard AI tells in “Marty’s” many similes. And the fact that this Lombard character has no trace on the internet.

As Alexis Petridis noted in The Guardian yesterday, musician poets aren’t exactly novel in newsletter country. Mr. Zimmerman joins a community well-staffed with peers; “everyone from Patti Smith and Dolly Parton to Charli xcx and Rosalía,” is on Substack.

Though it’s harder to spot a financial impetus in this case. And then there’s the mystifying whiff of slop.

Then again, maybe it’s all a prank at our expense. We’ve been fooled by Tedham Porterhouse before. And as Petridis observes, “if the whole business seems a little puzzling, there’s decades of evidence to suggest that simply makes it very on brand.”