A new song from The Beatles is being made using AI technology and what kind of sorcery is this?!

You might have heard some scary things about artificial intelligence lately, and you’d be right for feeling a little frightened. We wouldn’t want our every move monitored by robots, either.

But there are some good things that are coming out of AI advancement. Like… The Beatles releasing a brand new song thanks to John Lennon’s voice being lifted from demo tracks and weaved into musical magic.

In a BBC interview this week, Paul McCartney said that AI technology was being used to “extricate” the voice of John Lennon from an old demo and being utilised in one last Beatles song, which will be released this year.

McCartney, 84, said the song was made with the help of film director Peter Jackson, who used the same AI technology for The Beatles documentary Get Back – so you know it will work. For that film, Jackson cleverly separated the voices from the instruments and jumble up vowels and syllables to create new vocals.

“He was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette,” tells McCartney. “It had John’s voice and a piano [and] he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar’. So it has great uses.”

It’s kind of freaky, when you think about, but also fantastic that the Fab Four will be fab once more.

Antonino Tati