Paul McCartney used artificial intelligence to compose a new Beatles song – artificial intelligence

Now, Paul McCartney appears to be a member of the “professional” bandwagon, at least in part, after creating a “new” Beatles song using artificial intelligence and releasing it to the public later this year.

The song features vocals by John Lennon taken from an old demo recording. BBC report that Break the news first states that it is likely from “Now and Then”, a 1978 Lennon recording which was recorded from Lennon’s living room in New York shortly before his death. The inspiration for the song came from Peter Jackson’s documentary Get Back, McCartney told the BBC, in which the process used a custom artificial intelligence system to separate the voices of the different Beatles members from the background noise, allowing for higher quality reproduction.

According to the publication, there had been an earlier attempt to record this track with the surviving Beatles around 1995, but George Harrison refused mid-process due to the poor quality of Lennon’s track. The AI-assisted separating and cleaning of tracks restored the vocals to a point where McCartney stated that it was possible to mix a track as cleanly as if it had been freshly recorded for that purpose.

However, McCartney shows some skepticism – without excluding new technology – when it comes to artificial intelligence that produces music that is supposed to sound like John Lennon’s original recordings, after it was actually created out of thin air. “It’s kind of scary but also exciting because it’s the future,” he told the BBC, when people showed him AI-generated versions of Lennon singing his songs.

“We just have to see where this leads,” he added.