No modern journalist ever thought that he’d be writing a story about the new Beatles track, but according to former Beatle Paul McCartney today, that’s about to happen thanks to new developments in artificial intelligence.

The singer-songwriter, who’s one of two Beatles still alive along with Ringo Starr, told the BBC that new technology has allowed him and his production team to “extricate” the voice of John Lennon (pictured) – the outspoken Beatle who was gunned down in New York City in 1980. He said the track will be out this year, and although he didn’t name it, it’s thought it will be a 1978 Lennon ditty called “Now and Then.”

The song is one of several songs on a cassette that Lennon had labeled “For Paul” not long before he died. He’d made the track by himself, recording the vocals and piano on a boombox in his apartment in New York. After McCartney received the tapes in 1995, attempts were made to do something with the songs, but the sound quality was so bad that nothing came of it.

This new song became possible after the film director Peter Jackson used AI to reconstruct music in the documentary “Get Back.” The technology was able to “extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette,” according to McCartney. “We had John’s voice and a piano, and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine: That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.”

“It’s a very interesting thing, you know,” McCartney told the BBC regarding the possibilities of AI. “It’s something we’re all sort of tackling at the moment and trying to deal with.” He’s excited about the song but admitted that where AI is concerned and how fast it’s developing at the moment, there’s a “good side” and a “scary side.”

Indeed, there are concerns that if AI can make music, perfectly recreate and clone voices, knock up artwork in seconds or write stories – albeit bad ones so far – will real creators become redundant? There’s a meme going around the internet at the moment which says something like: We thought AI was here to do the jobs no one wanted, not the jobs everyone dreams of doing.

AI is a long way from mimicking having a heart or a soul or displaying unbounded curiosity and creativity, so the artists of the world should probably not worry about their jobs just yet. Still, AI-rendered songs by big-name pop stars such as Drake and Kanye West have been going viral on social media of late.

British music fans in April were treated to a new Oasis album, the “Lost album,” even though the band split up years ago. The two Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel, singer and songwriter, respectively, have famously not talked in years. When Liam heard his AI-rendered voice on tracks written, he was apparently impressed.

“We’re bored of waiting for Oasis to reform, so we’ve got an AI-modeled Liam Gallagher to step in and help out,” explained the band that made the album. Is it too much to imagine that sometime soon, pop stars will be outdone by anyone with some AI technology who will be able to have AI create the lyrics, and the music, with a recreation of the voice?  What if it sounds better than the artists’ real stuff?

One of the most respected songwriters of the last 30-odd years, the Australian music maverick Nick Cave, doesn’t like what he’s seeing. Earlier this year, said the ChatGPT platform should “leave songwriting alone.” He’d earlier called AI a “grotesque mockery of what it means to be human.”

Photo: Wiki