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If I could confront my past self and try to explain what it feels like to be alive in 2026, I might summarize the absurdity by saying that Bob Dylan launched a Patreon account and was forced to settle for the username BobDylan180 because his real name was apparently unavailable.
The Nobel Prize winner, whoe acclaimed albums stretch across seven decades and irreversibly influenced the history of American music, has turned to the direct-to-consumer service to paywall his AI-generated videos of historical figures that have filled his Instagram grid for the past year.
For $5 a month, you can enjoy strange little clips with titles like “Letters Never Sent #1: Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino” and “The Life and Death of Wild Bill,” which use generative AI to bring dead historical figures “to life” in videos “curated” by Bob Dylan — a common attribution for AI art that acknowledges a human’s input without going so far as to label them a creator.
Dylan formalizing his interest in AI is sure to be a gut punch to legions of fans who love studying his poetic, referential lyrics. (I’d wager there’s quite a bit of overlap between people who consider themselves anti-AI absolutists and people who think “Time Out of Mind” is a brilliant album.) It poses a conundrum for fans who want to support the best human artists: How do we reckon with aging heroes who embrace a technology diametrically opposed to what we love about them?
David Lynch created some of the most original images ever captured on film, using everything from rudimentary analog equipment to the finest technologies of the 21st century. Toward the end of his life, he became genuinely interested in generative AI.
“I think it’s fantastic,” the auteur said in a 2024 interview with Sight & Sound. “I know a lot of people are afraid of it. I’m sure, like everything, they say it’ll be used for good or for bad. I think it’d be incredible as a tool for creativity and for machines to help creativity. The good side of it’s important for moving forward in a beautiful way.” He never incorporated AI into a project, but that is arguably due to him simply not living long enough.
There’s also Paul Schrader, who has said that AI-generated feature films are only two years away, and and that he’s already written a script he plans to make using the technology. And Darren Aronofsky, whose AI-generated “1776” webseries attracted widespread outcry and ridicule. When these filmmakers talk about AI, they see it as an exciting new frontier rather than a soulless plagiarism machine.
“Filmmaking has always been driven by technology,” Aronofsky said in a statement announcing his partnership with Google DeepMind. “After the Lumière Brothers and Edison’s ground-breaking invention, filmmakers unleashed the hidden storytelling power of cameras. Later technological breakthroughs — sound, color, VFX — allowed us to tell stories in ways that couldn’t be told before. Today is no different. Now is the moment to explore these new tools and shape them for the future of storytelling.”
It’s always tempting to reduce our insanely complicated world to battles between good and evil. And when the battleground is AI and art, geniuses often seem like The Good Guys. Watching them experiment with this technology complicates that argument.
My visceral distaste for AI art comes from how easy it is to make. I love art because I want to watch the Bob Dylans and David Lynches and Paul Schraders of the world push their brains to the absolute limit in pursuit of telling new stories, and then celebrate them when they do.
It’s far from the only reason not to like the stuff: There’s also environmental concerns about the amount of water it uses, the fact that it learns from the work of human artists and rips them off without compensation, and the broader issue of eliminating jobs and robbing us of purpose.
Finally, as someone who loved cinema and music and literature long before I learned how to think critically about their economics, I’m angriest about the oxygen that it’s taking away from our most talented human artists.
Still: there’s no denying that these people have talent. They’ve proven their ability to make incredible work without AI. And their creative abilities only makes the tension between their past bodies of work and their current endeavors harder to process.
It’s not as if artists are only turning to AI when their creativity runs out, either. I recently attended a Bob Dylan concert and left struck by how sharp his musical and literary instincts remain. A month before his 85th birthday, he is still rolling out unrecognizable new arrangements of classic songs. And the lyrics from his most recent album, 2020’s “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” are aging among some of his very best late career fare.
I was so impressed by the musical product that I revisited some of his latest AI videos in the afterglow of the concert… and they were just as baffling and incoherent as I remembered. Dylan’s Patreon is neither a brilliant multimedia project or a sign that his skills are fading. It’s just a Nobel Prize winner devoting a decent chunk of his twilight years to ethically dubious shitposting.
Artistic geniuses will continue dipping their toes in AI and fans shouldn’t expect easy answers. For myself I’ve decided that when we love someone, we have to love them warts and all. I also recognize that the traits that may lead our heroes toward AI slop are often the very ones we admired in the first place. Revered creators are often consistently curious, open to new technologies, and willing to risk alienating their fans. That can be Dylan going electric for “Like a Rolling Stone” or Lynch experimenting with digital cameras and getting “Inland Empire.”
It can also lead to… this.
Part of the fun of being a cinephile is analyzing the lives of brilliant but complicated people whose work often reflects their tumultuous personal lives and inconsistent views. Perfect work is inseparable from imperfect lives, but sometimes all you can do is accept that you love something made by someone with whom you’d be deeply incompatible. AI in movies isn’t going anywhere, but at least it hasn’t killed that time-honored tradition.
I don’t know if I can square the fact that artists who taught me what it means to be human support a technology that feels fundamentally anti-human. But has truly great art ever been easily distilled?
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