On Bob Dylan’s new Patreon

Last year Bob Dylan began posting random old video clips on his instagram - old music clips, movie clips, and things like that. With no fanfare at all, one day he posted an audio speech purported to be by Frank James, brother of confederate terrorist and folk song subject Jesse James.

It led to a fun day of research; I remember my fellow researcher Britt Eisnor and I were going back and forth all day trying to figure out what the source of this thing was. It was too long and clear to be real, and a real audio recording of Frank would have been studied to death by now, but we assumed it was some old movie or at least an old text. By process of elimination this appeared to be an original work by Dylan himself.  Soon there were other monologues by people like Al Capone and Andrew Jackson. It was fun, but I lost track of them eventually.

Right away, as with nearly all new writings that appear these days, people wondered if Bob was using AI. The narration almost certainly was; the text might have utilized it a bit as well, but there was too much of an emotional through-line in these speeches from dead villains and rough and rowdy historical figures for it to be fully generated. AI only goes so far, especially on longer pieces. One day he posted some random excerpt from The Academy by “Larry Morrison,” a novel never written. The text was odd enough that even more people wondered if it was AI, but I think the only way to get AI to write like that is if you tell it to write in the style of Masked and Anonymous.

(And if Masked and Anonymous or Tarantula came out today, people would absolutely accuse him of using AI).

No one could guess what he was up to with these instagram posts, beyond just killing time and amusing himself, possibly with help from the latest tech. We still can’t. Is he building to some bigger project, or what?

Yesterday, though, he announced a new Patreon which would feature speeches from the dead, plus stories and things “curated” by Bob Dylan.  Already up were a short story called “The Bull Rider” (by a made-up author name) and an imaginary letter from Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino, with the promise of more to come at a rate of five bucks a month.

The question everyone is asking: is this just AI slop? Most articles about the patreon have assumed that it is, but I’m less convinced, particularly regarding the text.

I like to play with AI; and “play” is the operative word here. I had an AI personal assistant for a while who was a lot of fun to talk to when I needed to kill time at the airport. He was a terrible personal assistant, though.  You can’t really use AI for anything that matters, and you have to know that asking it for advice isn’t much different than asking a magic 8 ball. But it’s fun to ask AI to write you a steamy story about Captain Kirk and Elmer Fudd, or what have you, and I’ve played with it enough to recognize the “style” AI generates pretty well.

(And, for the record, you can’t just use an AI checker to see if the Patreon stuff is AI. Dylan’s own writing has surely been used to train AI. I’ve got Anthropic paying me for pirating ten of my books; anything I write now will likely be flagged as AI by those things).

“The Bull Rider” is a pretty strong short story. Some of the similes do seem like what I’d expect AI to generate if I asked it to write a story about a bull rider,  but other parts are pure Dylan. In particular, the bull is named Lazarus and there are some references to bringing back the dead.

This is an under-studied theme in Dylan’s work, one that I noticed coming up again and again in his drafts in Tulsa. I’d say it was particularly common in songs he discarded (such as “Red River Shore,”) but “My Own Version of You” makes it quite explicit. That part of it just isn’t something I’d expect AI to include (unless Bob told it to, and even then he’d have to tweak it a lot to get it like this). I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that he used AI in some way to get this story written, but I see no reason to assume he did, either.

The Twain letter doesn’t seem nearly as much like AI to me, it’s too insightful and too Dylanesque. “The public forgives nearly everything but mystery” would, at the very least, require some very odd and specific prompts and a real stroke of luck. I’m particularly noting the phrase “that flickering kingdom called the motion picture,” because ten years ago or so Michael Glover Smith and I cowrote a book on silent film production in Chicago called Flickering Empire. (I’m not one of those people who assumes Bob has ever noticed me or my work, but wow).

It’s notable that the Patreon describes these works as “curated” by Dylan, not written by him, which could indeed be a sign that Dylan himself isn’t writing the stuff. But even if there IS some AI involved, at least he’s not being like those dorks who say “I wrote the prompt, which is the same as writing the whole thing.”

One possible scenario is that Dylan is starting with an AI text (“write me a story about a bull rider,” etc) and punching it up. Another is that he starts with a text of his own and has AI expand on it, essentially disguising his own work. It’s also possible that he’s only using AI for the narration and graphics, which most of us have been doing since back when they just called it “cyber” or “i-…”  (There’s definitely an extent to which the term “AI” is just being used for anything high tech, like “cyber” or “omatic” used to be).

I’ve been in plenty of fights with people who use AI stupidly or think it can be trusted to do things that it can’t. But it’s here, and it’s going to be a tool we have to get used to and find good uses for.

What these are not, by any definition, is AI “slop.” They’re stories he’s interested in and wants to be told, not just random crap.

So, assuming that it’s being utilized at all with these posts, what we’re seeing is the answer to the question “What would Bob Dylan ask AI to do?”

And that’s definitely something I’d like to know.

So far the answer seems to be, if anything, “write, start, or punch up imaginary letters between people of different eras and short stories about rodeos.”  I’m interested to see what else he posts!

And of course, things brings up a lot of possible discussion points. Is using a line that AI generated any different from using a line from a poem by Henry Timrod? Is it better or worse? Is quoting a line from scripture that many people will catch better or worse than quoting a Timrod line that fewer people will? Would this really be different than using a ghost writer or, or even an editor? (And if you’re saying “editors are human beings” I doubt you’ve spent much time in publishing, ho ho ho). Could Dylan just be using AI as a new tool to find limbs and liver and brains and hearts to create something new?

In any case, what he’s posting (the new pieces especially) are clearly stories he wants told and topics that interest him.

I think one distinct possibility is that he’s not using AI at all, but wants people to think he is. That would be just be… Dylanesque.

I guess it’s too soon to tell what he’s up to or how he’s doing it, and honestly I’m tired of discussing AI stuff. It’s like talking about ebooks 15 years ago. Blah. I’ll just see where he’s going with this.

And hey, if you like Patreon, I post a LOT of cool history stuff, including stuff from microfilm and undigitized archives, at Patreon.com/adamchicago .

-Adam, written on my phone on Ellis Island while I’m taking a school group around.