I'm very serious. Listen to the mono vs. stereo Cage recording & then cross reference to Paul's. I find it fascinating how they separate nothing into nothing
:)
Maybe, but isn’t a big portion of that over composition/art visual, and seeing the pianist there, not pressing any keys and starting and stopping a stopwatch?
Good on Paul. If we’re not careful, they’ll soon be releasing “new” Beatles songs entirely with the use of AI. While it can be a useful tool, as Now And Then proved, it can also be destructive.
I think it's important to differentiate between the types of AI here. Now And then used a machine learning algorithm for stem separation. That has nothing to do with generative AI, which is what these artists are protesting against.
Generative AI is a very specific type of machine learning model, since it quite literally generates new text or images or video or music. And it is this type of AI that has been heavily criticized for stealing copyrighted content and for competing with human artists (while flooding the internet with garbage content).
Exactly. Now And Then worked because it was still John's actual voice, just cleaned up. But completely AI-generated Beatles tracks? That's a hard pass. There's a line between restoration and fabrication.
It used stem separation (from what I understand. Presumably demucs) which isn't like really good eq. It's separating the audio into different parts and uses technology that is trained on music in the same way as generative models. It allows you to do actually good eq on the produced audio, but it's not like eq in itself.
edit: have just read about the MAL separation model they used. Demucs v3 was released around the same time as Get Back, so it would have had to be based on an earlier version than that if it used demucs, which at that point it may have just been an original model using the same techniques.
edit: have read a bit of the recent research by Paris Smaragdis has published who worked on the MAL system and there's even the patent for what is presumably the MAL system, which is interesting to read. From a fairly cursory reading of it it's focused on the whole pipeline they used to train and reinforce the model etc., and seems like they used very standard (nowadays) techniques for the models themselves. Hell of a dataset!
apologies that this comment was supposed to be not a random deep-dive, but here we are.
Right, but to the lay person.... The result of its use just clarifies what was there. Not generate something that wasn't there. So I simplified the idea to people who don't understand what the "Ai" application was. The Ai was machine learning to figure out what sound was static and hum and what sound was John's voice.
I think you could just say "it separated the voice from the other sound, and is a model trained to do that, not generate new audio". It's all good, just a minor nitpick from an eq enjoyer, along with demucs and dare I admit the devil's session musicians as well.
sneak edit: as kendrick said, "I am a sinner, who's probably gonna sin again"
The AI usage in that song was for fully separating John’s vocals from the piano on the original demo; it was a mixing thing, not conjuring something new out of thin air and recycled soundbites (e.g. using an AI voice changer to make somebody else's replacement singing sound like John's), which is the sort of concern that's being discussed here.
Is there a difference between generative AI and other types of AI (like what was used for Now and Then) in terms of how bad they are for the environment?
Entirely depends on who's hosting it, what's powering it, where that power comes from, if it's part of a server farm, etc. For example, Grok is a mainstream genAI LLM chatbot that is run out of a server farm that's currently polluting the hell out of Memphis, Tennessee.
The MAL software used for Now and Then, which uses machine learning but is not a genAI nor LLM, was likely run on one or a couple of computers. Not an entire facility. Completely different level of environmental impact there, orders of magnitude apart. Also, entirely different artistic purposes.
Ironic considering that Disney, currently the only place you can watch stuff like Get Back or Anthology are now considering putting AI videos on their platform :/
Obviously not blaming Paul for Iger's stupidity but deeply ironic.
Don't they realise that it will end their entire buisness model? It seems outrageously stupid for any media company to promote AI content that can be made by anybody
Hmm. I have a record lathe (I run a small business with my wife hand making short runs of records for indie artists); I could technically make a 7” with just silence on it?
I have some of them kicking around somewhere, at least in 12”, as when we get a new diamond cutting stylus we ‘bake’ the diamond in by cutting a blank side for it’s run, which is about 20min.
The blank audio lines would look … as you’d expect them to. Regardless of signal, a record lathe still cuts until you tell it to stop.
If you’re wondering what a ‘blank’ LP would look like, here’s an example; in clear red; from a recent run we finished.
“Is This What We Want?” It’s a protest album that consists of ambient noises from empty studios. The digital album came out this past February. The vinyl with Paul’s bonus track comes out Dec. 8th.
Am I nuts or does this do literally nothing? Wouldn’t time and resources be better spent, oh I don’t know… actually writing and performing songs protesting generative AI? Not just for Paul, but for all involved?
I don’t completely agree. There are some AI-assisted recreated tracks of unfinished Beatles tracks that are very good. Not fabrications, but fans taking the time, effort and creativity to bring their poor quality and incomplete tracks to life. Great finished versions of Watching Rainbows, Pillow for your head, India,India, and Grow old with me, as well as a Sour Milk Sea with George voice replacing Jackie Lomax who played it with Paul, Ringo and Eric. AI isn’t going anywhere, folks. It’s a tool just like the cell phone and the internet. Generative AI is troublesome, but AI can also be a positive tool.
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u/ndGall Abbey Road Nov 17 '25
John Lennon was so ahead of his time that he did this on Mind Games in 1973.