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On Sunday, Bob Dylan posted an Instagram Story with a flyer for a new Patreon account. For $5 a month, the curious and masochistic can get access to “Lectures from the Grave,” what the page describes as “a living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent, and original short stories curated by Bob Dylan.” That last word — “curated” — is doing a lot of work, because Dylan isn’t claiming to have written any of it. The pen names are fake (Herbert Foster, Marty Lombard), the audio voices are AI-generated, and the results bear all the hallmarks of a human-machine collaboration where the machine did most of the heavy lifting.
There are currently six posts: three audio monologues in the voices of Aaron Burr, Wild Bill Hickok, and the Confederate outlaw Frank James; a fictional letter from Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino; a short story called “Bull Rider”; and, for reasons known only to Dylan, an embedded YouTube video of Mahalia Jackson performing on The Ed Sullivan Show. It is unclear how much of the writing comes from Dylan himself, though the words sound passably period, if historically wobbly. But the flaws are so glaring that “Lectures from the Grave” — advertised with the tagline “the dead speak!” — almost becomes an anti-manifesto: a wild warning for the AI age of what not to do.
When I first saw Dylan advertising the lectures, I’ll admit to a mixture of curiosity and dread. Dylan’s romantic obsessions shaped Western music and earned him a Nobel Prize in Literature. Now, the 84-year-old has turned his attention to great minds of the past, lingering on ambitious oddballs, killers, and scoundrels. How deep would he go, I wondered? Would he obsess over details, meticulously recreating these exceptional lives? Or would he use AI to half-ass it?
Unfortunately the results are in, and that’s Bob’s crack hanging out of the passing car window.
Three of the five reviewed pieces are audio monologues performed by AI-generated voices, and not one of them can decide where it’s from. Aaron Burr’s accent swings from Alabama to Texas, rarely alighting in the Newark and New York where the real Burr lived. The software seems pulled toward a generic southern drawl like water down a drain, especially after proper nouns like “Richmond, Virginia.”
At one point Burr sighs “Ahhh, Hamilton,” and the tone is dead wrong — it sounds like someone turned on the vibrating bed when he didn’t expect it. Wild Bill has the opposite problem: after establishing the character’s British, Irish, and Scots background, the voice bounds for the mid-Atlantic. Frank James, born and raised in Clay County, Missouri, sounds vaguely British — less Confederate guerrilla, more Errol Flynn doing Robin Hood. I kind of doubt Dylan listened to any of these all the way through.
The scripts underneath aren’t much better. Wild Bill’s story meanders over the first 20 minutes, circling back to childhood as though the AI lost its place and nobody corrected it. Frank James plods through war, Northfield, love, honor, and regret like a checklist of themes, hitting every expected beat without earning any of them. Burr is about fame and pride, Wild Bill about risk calculation, Frank James about regret — all worthy subjects for a Dylan project, and all undercut by the structural mess of the delivery.
The Mark Twain letter is the strongest entry by a real margin. Written as a posthumous note from Twain to Rudolph Valentino, the pastiche mostly works: the self-deprecating wit, the long sentences that coil around a punchline, the gentle intellectual snobbery all land as plausible Twain. But the letter ends with a facsimile of Twain’s signature, and here the project’s big problem comes into focus. Why fake the signature but not make the PDF look like an actual letter from beyond the grave? With no barrier to trying again, with AI as a collaborator and infinite drafts as a possibility, why settle for half-committed? The signature is the whole project in miniature: a gesture toward ambition that quits early.
Then there’s “Bull Rider,” a short story about a drifter who rides a bull named Lazarus at a Texas rodeo. The structure moves, and “Lazarus” is a good name for a bull. But the prose is gasping for profundity on every line. Trucks scream past “like prophets who had somewhere better to be.” Women move “like music.” It reads like an Old Man and the Sea cosplay through the American Southwest, every simile flexing in the mirror, and between them the philosophical asides — “losing isn’t an event, it’s a lifestyle” — land like underbaked fortune cookies in cowboy hats.
That’s the thread that ties all five pieces together. Dylan didn’t go deep. He didn’t obsess. He waved a hand at history and let the machine fill in the rest, and the machine did what machines do: it produced text that sounds like writing without doing what writing does. “Lectures from the Grave” is a $5-a-month reminder that the hardest part of making something isn’t generating the words. It’s caring enough to fix them.
English (US) · 