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Bob Dylan's AI "Lectures from the Grave" Are an Accidental Warning for What Not to Do: Review [View all]
https://consequence.net/2026/03/bob-dylan-ai-lectures-from-the-grave-review/Bob Dylan’s AI “Lectures from the Grave” Are an Accidental Warning for What Not to Do: Review
Wayward accents, meandering plot lines, and more misadventures for $5 a month
Wren Graves
March 30, 2026 | 5:30pm ET
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.
-snip-
Wayward accents, meandering plot lines, and more misadventures for $5 a month
Wren Graves
March 30, 2026 | 5:30pm ET
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.
-snip-
More at the link about how bad this is.
Found this review thanks to a one-word comment from writer/filmmaker/photojournalist/activist Greg Pak on Bluesky:
Gross.
— Greg Pak (@gregpak.net) 2026-03-30T22:46:12.211Z
Emmy-nominated TV writer and comedian Mike Drucker:
I know seeing this is a little sad, but if you read the article, I think you’ll be not at all surprised to find it’s also super fucking embarrassing
— Mike Drucker (@mikedrucker.bsky.social) 2026-03-30T22:53:44.622Z
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