Paul McCartney confirms nothing “artificial” about upcoming AI-assisted Beatles release

Paul McCartney has clarified what he meant when he said that a final Beatles record has been created “using AI”, which will be released later this year.

It was in an interview with the BBC earlier this month that McCartney mentioned that the magic of artificial intelligence was being employed to create one more Beatles track. That resulted in plenty of chatter to the effect that maybe an AI version of John Lennon was going to be recording some new vocals.

That said, it was pretty clear what McCartney meant in that interview. After all, he also talked about how during the production of Peter Jackson’s ‘Get Back’ documentary – about the making of the Beatles’ 1970 album ‘Let It Be’ – Jackson’s team had used technology to pull clean vocals off old tapes, separating the voices of each band member from any background noise.

Plenty of production techniques of this kind are now getting bundled under the AI banner. And then, the minute anyone says “AI”, we all get to assume that we’re talking about dead pop stars recording new vocals via the wonders of artificial intelligence.

Anyway, it seems that it’s the kind of “AI” process used by Jackson’s team that has helped turn an old Lennon demo track into an upcoming release. So don’t be going around suggesting anything otherwise, OK?

“Been great to see such an exciting response to our forthcoming Beatles project”, Macca wrote on Twitter yesterday. “No one is more excited than us to be sharing something with you later in the year”.

However, he added, “we’ve seen some confusion and speculation about it. Seems to be a lot of guess work out there. Can’t say too much at this stage but 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”.

“We hope you love it as much as we do”, he concluded, before promising “more news in due course”.