The band The Beatles won their eighth Grammy award thanks to unexpected help from AI. The 2023 track “Now and Then,” as reported by Billboard, became the first well-known work created with the involvement of generative AI to receive a Grammy nomination. This track won in the “Best Rock Performance” category, beating out competitors such as Green Day, Pearl Jam, The Black Keys, Idles, and St. Vincent.
The song was assembled from a demo recording that John Lennon made in the late 1970s. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison added their parts in the mid-1990s, aiming to include the final version in the “The Beatles Anthology” project. However, “Now and Then” was not released at that time due to technical limitations that prevented Lennon’s vocals and piano from being separated from the original demo.
McCartney and Starr were able to finish the song in 2021 thanks to the help of director Peter Jackson and his sound team. They developed a machine learning technology capable of isolating and cleaning up various components of Lennon’s recording. This is significantly different from generative AI technologies that can create music imitating an artist’s style and vocals.
In 2023, Paul McCartney clarified the role of AI in creating the track, stating: “To be clear, nothing was artificially or synthetically created. We all play on this recording.” He emphasized that cleaning up existing recordings is a process that has been ongoing for many years.
