In his new Youtube video, Darkness frontman Justin Hawkins discussed The Beatles’ new upcoming AI-assisted song.
For the AI-generated Beatles song, John Lennon’s voice was extracted from one of the old demos he had recorded and is set to come out later this year. In his video, Hawkins talked about the upcoming song’s scary side.
The frontman, starting with the good side of AI, said the following:
“I suppose the good side is that sonically it gives you options when you have a historical recording. The scary side would be if you then extracted that vocals and then told the computer to create the accompaniment for it, then… I don’t know.”
Hawkins is not fond of the idea of ‘robots’ creating music, and he made his view on the matter quite clear. He said:
“I don’t know; if you’re asking an autonomous, sentient robot to write you a song in the style of The Beatles, we lost. We have lost. Especially when there are members of The Beatles like Sir Paul McCartney still living, it’s not something you want to see.
And then, presumably, it would mean that you could do that with all of The Beatles’ music. You could actually just go for the entire catalog, extract the vocals on every single song The Beatles ever recorded, and then get a computer to put some… That’s how horrible that would be.”
Similarly, Paul McCartney thinks that using AI to revive his vocals is scary but, at the same time, exciting too.
Sean Taro Ono Lennon, son of Lennon, later revealed the song to be not wholly ‘made by AI,’ but instead only had the vocals cleaned up to remove any noise:
“I think people are deeply misunderstanding this story. The AI did nothing but clean the noise off of my dad’s vocal track. That’s all. Nothing else. The song was a demo Dad had recorded, and the other Beatles finished it off.”
See the entire video down below.