Legendary British musician Paul McCartney has admitted on Tuesday that artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to help create "the final Beatles album", featuring the late John Lennon on vocals.
Speaking to the BBC's Today programme, McCartney, 80, said the technology was used to "pull" Lennon's voice from an old music demo so he could complete the song.
"We have just finished it and it will be released this year," explained the former member of the "fabulous four" from Liverpool, although he did not name the song, although it is estimated, according to the BBC, that it would be a Lennon composition called Now and then, dating from 1978.
That composition, which McCartney had received from Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, had originally been considered part of a compilation of Beatles material in 1995.
However, according to McCartney, George Harrison had admitted that the song was "garbage" and refused to work on it. "It didn't have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and John sang it," he said. "(But) George didn't like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn't do it," he added.
The BBC says the turning point came with Peter Jackson's Get Back documentary a few years ago, which trained computers to recognize the Beatles' voices and separate them from background noise, and even from their own instruments, to create "clean" audio.
"He (Jackson) was able to get John's voice out of a small cassette," McCartney told Radio 4. "We had John's voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI. They say to the machine, 'That's the voice. This is a guitar. Get the guitar out," the musician explained.
Thus, it was possible to take the voice of John Lennon and get it pure through this AI, said McCartney, who admitted, however, that other applications of AI are a cause for concern.
"It's a bit scary but it's exciting because it's the future. We'll have to see where it takes us," he said. McCartney discussed AI ahead of an exhibition of his photographs that will be open to the public later this month at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Titled "Eyes of the Storm," the exhibition features portraits taken by McCartney with his own camera between December 1963 and February 1964, when the Beatles were catapulted to fame.
The images taken by McCartney capture numerous intimate moments of the band members, and offer a unique look at the environment, the personality and the way in which the musicians perceived the phenomenon of "beatlemania" that was growing.
