In 1970, Paul McCartney wrote the song “Let It Be” for The Beatles. One of their most famous tracks, it ruminates on the very human urge to seek solutions in times of stress, coming to the delicate and ear worming conclusion that it's best to just let life work itself out. It's a simple but radical idea: just let the unpredictability of being human unfold naturally, through growth, death, heartbreak, or any manner of uncertainty. But with news this week that Paul McCartney has used AI to adapt John Lennon's voice for one final Beatles song, it's a shame he didn't think to take his own advice.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4, McCartney revealed that the producers of the track have used the technology du jour to “extricate” Lennon's voice from an unreleased demo so that it could be manipulated to finish a song that he's hoping will be released this year. According to the BBC, the song is likely “Now And Then”, a Lennon-penned track that was, at one point, going to be a semi-reunion song for the group in 1995. Incomplete in construction, George Harrison, who died in 2001, apparently didn't like it. “It didn't have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it”, McCartney later told Q Magazine, reinforcing over the years how he'd like to release the song at some point.
It's hard to say that we don't need another Beatles song, because who wouldn't want more of the most definitive band of a generation? Where peers like The Rolling Stones and Queen have been able to resuscitate their careers into old age, The Beatles are sort of preserved in amber. The group is the definition of burning bright and fast, existing in their quartet form for just over a decade before splitting in 1970, and any hope of reconciliation in the future was tragically cut short by Lennon's murder 10 years later. We never got the chance to see The Beatles come together (pardon the pun) older, wiser and perhaps with their egos sanded down by the passage of time. Instead, their end feels punctuated with a comma rather than a full stop; there's a perpetual ‘What if?’ quality to them.
With the emergence of AI over recent years, there's been a sense of looming dread, an unease about when and how lines will be crossed in art from the innovative to dystopic. We've already seen deceased actors reanimated for bit parts in the likes of Star Wars and the upcoming The Flash in cash grabs packaged up as memorials, but for the most part, they're 'blink and you'll miss it' pangs of nostalgia. Then there's the Abba Voyage ‘hologram-but-not-really-hologram’ concert experience, where fans can enjoy them in their 70s and 80s heydey thanks to AI technology. But seeing as all four members of Abba are still alive and consented to the chance to rake in the cash from their armchairs, there's really no dicey moral quandary. When it comes to reanimations of artists who've died, however, there's still a big question mark over who and when will be the first to tour ‘from the grave’ and who will be making money from their likeness.
For now, the quagmire of ethics around AI corpse puppetry still – even with technology speeding towards us like a bullet train – feels more like an episode of Black Mirror than our immediate reality. Beyond aimlessly doom-guessing the future, a bigger, more pertinent question persists about how we value the art we already have.
It's human nature to want more. More time, more things, more content, more everything. We're voracious with longing, and gluttons for the things that make us feel good. Of course we want more of The Beatles, but how much of that desire is because we were robbed of the more we would have had? They're a band as much defined by their record-breaking output as they are by their short time together. The Beatles' end was a full stop – just not the one that anyone would have wanted. John Lennon's death didn't negate his previous work or make any of it less valuable because of its inability to be more than what it was. Paul McCartney may want to finish an unpolished Beatles song, but he cheapens Lennon's humanity in the process.
The old saying goes that we want what we can't have, but AI is blurring that line. Perhaps we're now entering a world where we want what we shouldn't have, but are getting it anyway.
