They get by with a little help from… artificial intelligence?
It’s another sign of how AI is being woven more and more into the fabric of our lives.
Paul McCartney received the demo tape in 1994 from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono.
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.
In a press release, thesurviving Beatles call this “a truly fitting full-circle counterpart.”
It may be the least controversial use of AI in the music industry.
– 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 does things like process photos on your smartphone or give you wording prompts when you’re texting.
It’s also an emerging tool for making music.
It’s a four-minute melding of archival shots of the Beatles with current ones of McCartney and Starr.
I’m not sure I’m always going to support using technology like this.
The use of technology – whether AI or not – in the audio portion bothers me even less.
At the start of 2023, singer-songwriterNick Cavecalled an AI song written in his style “grotesque mockery.”
But others, including musician and filmmaker Taryn Southern,who spoke to CNET in 2022, are intrigued.
Southern used the technology to create her 2018 record I Am AI.
An artificial intelligence program wrote the music, with Southern contributing lyrics and melodies.
The debate about how AI will shape the future of music is getting harder to avoid.
Time magazine this summer rounded up its list of the100 most influential people in AIand included two musicians.
One of them, singer-songwriterHolly Herndon, created a vocal deepfake of herself, Holly+, in 2021.
Indie artistGrimesalso made the list.
This year, Grimes released AI software called Elf.Tech that lets other people “sing through her voice.”
But we can hardly avoid it any longer.
The Beatles song: AI to what degree?
McCartney said Jackson used AI to “extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette.”
Beyond that, the details get a little fuzzy.
(Machine learning, in which computers recognize patterns on their own, is one element of AI.)
Instead, the technology was simply used to clear up the original performance.
Neither of the stars whose voices were mimicked had anything to do with the song.
Heart on My Sleeve is mostly original, written and recorded by humans.
AI vocal filters, however, were indeed used to imitate the voices of the two musicians.
Musical opinions differ on AI
McCartney has admitted he’s a bit wary of AI.
“It’s kind of scary but exciting, because it’s the future.
We’ll just have to see where that leads.”
Ghostwriter, meanwhile, has ideas for where it might lead.
Plus users can’t use my voice for hate speech or politics.
It’s possible to create tech that can have permissions like that.
I think that’s where we are headed."
It’s hard to argue with rewarding original artists – or with keeping hate speech out of their mouths.
I saw The Terminator and War Games.
That said, in the music field, we’re unlikely to encounter actual killer robots or nuclear weaponry.
Ghostwriter’s statement is more positive than one might expect from someone who’s so obviously pro-AI.
Artists deserve to be paid, and they certainly deserve not to hear their voice spouting hate speech.
And they’re unlikely to sit back and take unfair representation, either.
Just look at theangerstirred whenever an artist’s song is played at a political event with which they disagree.
But there are always degrees to any change.
But it seems the two surviving Beatles are fans of the process.
Last week, a 12-minute music video detailing the making of Now and Then debuted onYouTubeandDisney Plus.
In it, McCartney ponders whether Lennon would’ve wanted them to finish his song.
His decisive answer: “Yeah!
He would’ve loved that.”
Ringo Starr calls the ability to work with his late bandmate’s vocals “far out.”
And the fabled voice rings out, clear and familiar, old yet new.
