They get by with a little help from… artificial intelligence? The Beatles, perhaps the most legendary musicians of all time, are back in the news despite breaking up more than 50 years ago. The newly released recording that’s being called the Beatles’ last song now has a music video, and both elements used technology that wasn’t available during those heady days of Beatlemania. It’s another sign of how AI is being woven more and more into the fabric of our lives.
As we learned in June, the song, called Now and Then, was written and sung by John Lennon shortly before he was murdered in 1980. Lennon sat at a piano in his New York apartment in the Dakota and recorded the rough track onto a boom box.
Paul McCartney received the demo tape in 1994 from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono. The surviving members of the Beatles tried to record the song in the mid-1990s, but quality issues forced the band to shelve that idea, even though McCartney praised Lennon’s singing and the tune’s “beautiful verse.”
The Beatles who survived Lennon worked on the song over the years. George Harrison died in 2001, but McCartney and Ringo Starr continued the work.Â
For its release last week, a double A-side single pairs Now and Then, apparently the last Beatles’ song, with the very first one, the band’s 1962 debut single, Love Me Do. In a press release, the surviving Beatles call this “a truly fitting full-circle counterpart.”Â
It may be the least controversial use of AI in the music industry.
Over the last year, we’ve witnessed the rapid and breathtaking arrival of generative AI, best known in its ChatGPT form, which responds to the prompts we give it with startlingly humanlike answers. It’s hardly the only kind of AI out there, but it’s stirred anxiety over potentially dire scenarios — will it replace writers, artists and musicians? — as much as it’s been heralded for the good it can do.
But AI in its other forms has long been toiling away out of sight and largely in uncontroversial ways. It…
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