Beatles Singer Paul McCartney Says the Band Has Used AI to Create the “Final Beatles Album”

3 min readJun 15, 2023

Key takeaways

What singer Paul McCartney is calling The Beatles’ final album will use an AI-generated version of John Lennon’s voice
The move comes after other artists like Grimes have encouraged the use of AI in songs
AI in the media runs into copyright issues, as seen with Spotify pulling an AI-generated song using Drake and The Weeknd’s voices

Legendary pop band The Beatles are releasing their final album — and it’s all thanks to AI. Frontman Paul McCartney said the new technology was the reason they were able to bring back John Lennon’s voice to feature on a track, which is great for the fans, but the debate still rages on as to where the line should be drawn.

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What did Paul McCartney say?

Even though John Lennon died in 1980, his voice lives again to feature on a new track of what Paul McCartney is calling the Beatles’ final album.

McCartney said artificial intelligence could recreate John Lennon’s voice “from a ropey little bit of cassette” and clean up the audio so the long-dead bandmate could feature on an unfinished song from 1978.

AI was first used to extricate Lennon’s voice in Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary on the band, The Beatles: Get Back. The album is slated for release later this year.

AI’s role in media

There’s been an ongoing debate around whether the ethics of using deceased singers and actors’ likenesses, recreated by AI, in new albums and films is ethical. Tom Hanks recently commented that his image could be used in films “from now until kingdom come” thanks to AI, while singer Grimes has encouraged her fans to use AI-generated versions of her voice.

As it stands, no copyright rules are in place to handle AI in media. It’s how wildly popular programs like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion have been trained on copyrighted materials as part of the millions of data they consume to generate content.

There’s already been some backlash. Getty Images has sued Stable Diffusion and Stability AI in the U.S. for training its AI on images Getty owns, while Spotify recently pulled a song that had cloned artists Drake and The Weeknd’s voices after Universal Music said it violated copyright laws.

The bottom line

It’s one thing for Paul McCartney to recreate his former bandmate’s voice, but another entirely for people’s voices and likenesses to be used for deep fakes or in violation of copyright law. Some clarity is desperately needed on the subject, though the U.S. aims to have some draft legislation on AI regulation by the fall.

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