Paul McCartney clarifies comment about using A.I. to replicate John Lennon’s voice
McCartney explains that they just cleaned up old audio with a computer, which is totally normal
Last week, Paul McCartney made everyone in the world a little anxious by revealing that he was getting ready to release a brand new Beatles song featuring an A.I.-assisted version of John Lennon’s voice—a presumed necessity for any “new” Beatles track, since Lennon has been dead for a long time now.
While that was the buzzy headline version of the story, the truth—which we noted at the time in our write-up—was that McCartney wasn’t actually creating new Lennon vocals with some kind of A.I. algorithm. In reality, he was using the technology that Peter Jackson utilized to restore old Beatles rehearsal footage for his Get Back documentary to isolate and clean up existing Lennon vocals off of an unreleased demo recording.
Still, he said “A.I.,” and people (justifiably) don’t like the idea of some computer replacing anyone (whether it’s TV intro sequence animators or a beloved musical artist), and so the whole thing still seemed to leave Beatles fans a little uneasy. So, today, McCartney posted a clarification on Twitter, explaining that “nothing has been artificially or synthetically created,” adding, “It’s all real and we all play on it.” He noted that they “cleaned up some existing recordings” and that’s all, which is something that “has gone on for years.”
The problem with all of this is simply that McCartney casually mentioned that they were telling an A.I. to separate Lennon’s voice from the guitar sounds or whatever, which is probably totally accurate, but what he should’ve just said was that “a computer” had done it. If you say “we made a new Beatles song using old recordings and a computer,” you sound like a cool-ass hacker splitting code in the Matrix. If you say “we made a new Beatles song using A.I.,” you sound like you’re personally tearing up the “Imagine” memorial in Central Park and putting in a Tesla charging station.