The Beatles have won their eighth competitive Grammy award thanks to a little help from artificial intelligence. The 2023 track “Now and Then” — which Billboard reports is the first song knowingly created with AI assistance to earn a Grammy nomination — was awarded Best Rock Performance on Sunday, beating out competition from Green Day, Pearl Jam, The Black Keys, Idles, and St. Vincent.
That AI-restored Beatles song won Grammy for Best Rock Performance
The “Now and Then” track was released in 2023 after machine learning was used to clean up an old John Lennon demo.
The “Now and Then” track was released in 2023 after machine learning was used to clean up an old John Lennon demo.
is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.
The track was pieced together using a demo that John Lennon recorded in the late 1970s, with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison later providing their own contributions in the mid-‘90s, with the aim of including the final song in The Beatles Anthology project. “Now and Then” wasn’t released, however, due to technical limitations at the time preventing Lennon’s vocals and piano from being separated from the original lo-fi demo.
McCartney and Starr later managed to complete the song in 2021 with help from filmmaker Peter Jackson and his sound team, who developed machine-learning technology (a type of AI that uses algorithms to learn from data) capable of isolating and cleaning up different components of Lennon’s recording. This greatly differs from generative AI tech that can be used to create music that mimics an artist’s style and vocals, but confusion around AI terminology led to some backlash online when the track was released.
“To be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It’s all real and we all play on it,” McCartney said in 2023, addressing speculation about AI’s role in development. “We cleaned up some existing recordings — a process which has gone on for years.”
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