The legendary musician Paul McCartney has just revealed that artificial intelligence technology has been used to put the voice of John Lennon, who was murdered back in 1980, on an upcoming track for their band The Beatles.
#BestNewsHeadlineOfTheDay Paul McCartney is due to complete a song that John Lennon was working on in the 1970's using AI. Paul once said that John often visits him in his dreams, maybe this is where the inspiration for releasing one final Beatles song came from – NOW AND THEN🤔 pic.twitter.com/gnZv71Wq4y
— Colin Payn (@ColinPayn) June 13, 2023
McCartney Reveals Beatles Are Using AI
“It’s a very interesting thing, you know. It’s something we’re all sort of tackling at the moment and trying to deal with,” McCartney said, according to CNBC. “There’s a good side to it and then a scary side, and we’ll just have to see where that leads.”
McCartney, 80, went on to say that the Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson was able to “extricate” Lennon’s voice “from a ropey little bit of cassette.”
The A.I. technology was advanced enough to identify Lennon’s voice distinctly from the instrumentals and background interference.
“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on, and we just finished it up. It will be released this year,” McCartney explained. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI, so that then we could mix the record as you would normally do. It gives you some sort of leeway.”
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While the name of the new track has not been revealed, it’s believed that it will be the 1978 Lennon song “Now And Then,” which McCartney has previously said that he wanted to “finish.”
Paul McCartney will release "the final Beatles record" featuring John Lennon's vocals, thanks to a little help from AI. @laraspencer has more. pic.twitter.com/NVf3oPkkm6
— Good Morning America (@GMA) June 14, 2023
Related: ‘Family Ties’ Star Justine Bateman Issues Chilling Warning About AI In Hollywood
ABBA Star Talks AI
This comes after the ABBA legend Björn Ulvaeus warned about the future of AI in music.
“In the beginning, I think it [AI] will be a tool,” he recently told Rolling Stone. “I can sort of think of ways of using an AI, like if I was going to write a tango for a musical, I could conceivably train an AI on the 100 best tangos in the world as a starter and then ask the AI to write a tango, having trained from that set.”
“And it could well come up with something that’s not bad and you could tweak it yourself, so that the AI has given you the initial idea,” he continued. “That’s entirely OK and a bit like using our brains, really.”
However, Ulvaeus was quick to warn about where AI could go from there.
“That’s the first ten years of it and there will come a time when the AI itself can write conceivably original stuff and stuff that people won’t know if it’s come from an AI. That is going to happen,” he explained. “The most important thing right now with democracy at stake and other things is that we need to learn between AIs and humans so that whoever sends a message, there should be a little box somewhere to differentiate between the two. If that could be achieved, it would be a big help.”
“If AI can write something to make me cry, then I'll have to confess…It’s in the ‘ears’ of the beholder.” – Björn Ulvaeus during his meconvention Keynote on the future of the music industry since the rise of digitization. #createthenew pic.twitter.com/xIv06kuvyw
— Gidleigh Grounders (@GidleighGrounde) September 5, 2018
Related: Tom Hanks Reveals He’ll Star In Movies After His Death Using AI
‘Godfather Of AI’ Issues Warning
This also comes weeks after Geoffrey Hinton, who has been called the “Godfather of AI,” left his role at Google so that he could warn the world of the “dangers” of the very technology that he helped to design.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton told the New York Times.
“AI is a fantastic technology – it’s causing great advances in medicine, in the development of new materials, in forecasting earthquakes or floods… [but we] need a lot of work to understand how to contain AI,” he later added, according to Fox Business. “There’s no use waiting for the AI to outsmart us; we must control it as it develops. We also have to understand how to contain it, how to avoid its negative consequences.”
Today's and future AI.
Very dangerous pic.twitter.com/HCtWKtc0R0— Geoffrey Hinton (@G_Hinton_AI) June 13, 2023
We certainly are living in some crazy times, and the advances of AI only serve as proof of that. While it will be fun to hear Lennon’s voice on this new Beatles song, we can only hope that this AI technology is reigned in before it gets out of control.
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