"Critics and fans have long pored over his words, treating them as literary texts worthy of a slow, devotional reading, line by line, image by image. In 2016, Dylan even won the Nobel Prize in Literature. As the Swedish Academy put it, the prize honoured him for 'having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'. But what more might we discover if, instead of a human scholar, we asked an artificial intelligence to sift through every word Dylan ever wrote?"
"Today's AI systems, especially large language models (LLMs) capable of 'reading' and analysing text at scale, offer new ways to study art and literature. Think of it as a form of ' distant reading', the approach championed by the literary scholar Franco Moretti, which uses algorithms to examine large collections of texts from a bird's-eye view. A computer can crunch through hundreds of songs and identify patterns or themes"
Bob Dylan's six-decade songwriting career produces lyrics that invite repeated, close interpretation and earned a 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Large language models and AI enable distant reading by processing entire lyric corpora to detect patterns, themes, and stylistic evolution at scale. Algorithms provide vast coverage, consistent measurement, and the ability to trace changes across time in ways individual readers cannot easily quantify. Machine analysis can measure complexity, the mixing of novel and familiar imagery, and persistent ambiguity, offering new perspectives on how songs resonate and how lyrical qualities evolve across a large body of work.
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