{"id":378451,"date":"2026-04-06T20:42:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T20:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/378451\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T20:42:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T20:42:09","slug":"what-happens-when-aging-artists-embrace-ai-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/378451\/","title":{"rendered":"What Happens When Aging Artists Embrace AI? \u2014 Opinion"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> and was forced to settle for the username BobDylan180 because his real name was apparently unavailable.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>-generated videos of historical figures that have filled his Instagram grid for the past year. <\/p>\n

For $5 a month, you can enjoy strange little clips with titles like \u201cLetters Never Sent #1: Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino\u201d and \u201cThe Life and Death of Wild Bill,\u201d which use generative AI to bring dead historical figures \u201cto life\u201d in videos \u201ccurated\u201d by Bob Dylan<\/a> \u2014 a common attribution for AI art that acknowledges a human\u2019s input without going so far as to label them a creator.<\/p>\n

\"Exit<\/a> \"Katarina<\/a> <\/p>\n

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\u2019d wager there\u2019s quite a bit of overlap between people who consider themselves anti-AI absolutists and people who think \u201cTime Out of Mind\u201d 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?<\/p>\n

David Lynch created some of the most original images ever captured on film<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s fantastic,\u201d the auteur said in a 2024 interview with Sight & Sound<\/a>. \u201cI know a lot of people are afraid of it. I\u2019m sure, like everything, they say it\u2019ll be used for good or for bad. I think it\u2019d be incredible as a tool for creativity and for machines to help creativity. The good side of it\u2019s important for moving forward in a beautiful way.\u201d He never incorporated AI into a project, but that is arguably due to him simply not living long enough.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also Paul Schrader<\/a>, who has said that AI-generated feature films are only two years away, and and that he\u2019s already written a script he plans to make using the technology<\/a>. And Darren Aronofsky, whose AI-generated \u201c1776\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cFilmmaking has always been driven by technology,\u201d Aronofsky said in a statement announcing his partnership with Google DeepMind<\/a>. \u201cAfter the Lumi\u00e8re Brothers and Edison\u2019s ground-breaking invention, filmmakers unleashed the hidden storytelling power of cameras. Later technological breakthroughs \u2014 sound, color, VFX \u2014 allowed us to tell stories in ways that couldn\u2019t be told before. Today is no different. Now is the moment to explore these new tools and shape them for the future of storytelling.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s far from the only reason not to like the stuff: There\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

Finally, as someone who loved cinema and music and literature long before I learned how to think critically about their economics, I\u2019m angriest about the oxygen that it\u2019s taking away from our most talented human artists.<\/p>\n

Still: there\u2019s no denying that these people have talent. They\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cRough and Rowdy Ways,\u201d are aging among some of his very best late career fare. <\/p>\n

I was so impressed by the musical product that I revisited some of his latest AI videos in the afterglow of the concert\u2026 and they were just as baffling and incoherent as I remembered. Dylan\u2019s Patreon is neither a brilliant multimedia project or a sign that his skills are fading. It\u2019s just a Nobel Prize winner devoting a decent chunk of his twilight years to ethically dubious shitposting.<\/p>\n

Artistic geniuses will continue dipping their toes in AI and fans shouldn\u2019t expect easy answers. For myself I\u2019ve 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 \u201cLike a Rolling Stone\u201d or Lynch experimenting with digital cameras and getting \u201cInland Empire.\u201d <\/p>\n

It can also lead to\u2026 this.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d be deeply incompatible. AI in movies isn\u2019t going anywhere, but at least it hasn\u2019t killed that time-honored tradition.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If I could confront my past self and try to explain what it feels like to be alive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378452,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,4575,878,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-378451","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-bob-dylan","12":"tag-film","13":"tag-il","14":"tag-israel","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378451\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}