The globally popular English rock band, The Beatles, has just won another Grammy Award for their 2023 track “Now and Then.” The Grammy-winning song by The Beatles was deliberately created with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). For those wondering whether they produced the full track using AI, they didn’t. The band took minor help, which made it possible to release that track back in 2023.
The Beatles took little help from AI to create their Grammy-winning track
The Beatles’ Grammy-winning track has pieces of a demo recorded by John Lennon from the late 1970s when most people didn’t know about AI. The rest of The Beatles’ members, including Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison, later contributed to it in the mid-‘90s.
Well, The Beatles aimed to include the track as the final song in The Beatles Anthology Project. However, that didn’t happen. The separation of Lennon’s vocals and piano from the original lo-fi demo was not possible due to technical difficulties.
In 2021, filmmaker Peter Jackson, with his sound team, developed machine-learning technology. Not only did AI help The Beatles’ members, McCartney and Starr, complete the song, but helped add the eighth Grammy to their already big award cabinet.
There was some backlash when the track came out in 2023
The above process that helped The Beatles grab the eighth Grammy is different than today’s generative AI. These days, Gen AI is popular for creating music by mimicking artists’ vocals and styles. Since there was confusion about the same, the English rock band also faced some online backlash at the time of the track release.
However, McCartney came forward back then and clarified, “To be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It’s all real, and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings — a process which has gone on for years.” Speaking of tech, the US allows filing copyright for AI-generated content if it involves human editing.
