I’ve loved The Beatles for 30+ years, but I’m sorry – Now and Then did not deserve a Grammy

Beatles co-founder Paul McCartney gave an interview to the BBC in recent days, in which he implored the British government to rethink new copyright legislation in the country that would give more leeway to AI developers and systems. As the most famous rock bassist in the world explained it, his fear is that AI could eventually make it impossible for artists to make a living. "You get young guys, girls, coming up, and they write a beautiful song, and they don't own it," the 82-year-old musician told the BBC. "They don't have anything to do with it. And anyone who wants can just rip it off."

Using content without an artist's explicit permission ... now, where have I heard that before?

I'm sure that plenty of Beatles fans won't agree with me here, but you could absolutely make a case that the very thing Macca was talking about, using AI to co-opt the work of a creator without their approval, is kind of like what he and Ringo Starr did with Now and Then, The Beatles' final song (based on an unfinished John Lennon demo) that was released back in November 2023. In addition to newly recorded musical parts that the two surviving Beatles added to the track, technicians used AI to punch up the ragged demo and get it into a polished, release-ready state.

The Beatles at TVC animation Studios in London in November 1967. Image source: Mark and Colleen Hayward/Getty Images

And tonight, Now and Then won The Beatles a Grammy for Best Rock Performance, which is noteworthy for multiple reasons: It's the group's first Grammy award in 28 years, and it's also the first time a Grammy was awarded to a song that was explicitly created with the help of AI.

No surprise, the fact that the song relied on AI -- or machine learning, to be more specific, which was used to separate Lennon's voice from tape hiss -- has sparked a range of discourse online. "Machines have taken over," one user lamented on X following The Beatles' Grammy win. On the other end of the spectrum, there's an argument to be made that the use of AI in this case was merely complementary, augmenting content rather than "creating" something new based on AI inputs of dubious provenance.

Unlike my colleague Chris Smith, who feels that the use of AI to enhance dialogue in the critically acclaimed new movie The Brutalist should disqualify it from The Oscars, I'm not prepared to go so far as to condemn the use of AI outright in any work of art. Here, I have a much simpler reason for my strong feeling that The Beatles' new song didn't deserve a Grammy:

Objectively, it's not a great song. And it's not a great song, because Lennon never finished it in his lifetime. It was just a song fragment. If he was alive today, I just cannot see him being fine with putting the track out in its current form, especially with its kind of boring melody and in one instance some mind-bogglingly stupid lyrics (that I assume were mere placeholder lines for him) like: "And if you go / I know you'll never stay ..." Which is as asinine as saying, "And if you leave, I know you won't be here."

Certainly, McCartney and Starr had the approval to do this from Lennon's widow Yoko Ono, who handed over the cassette of Lennon's demo by way of officially blessing the project. But her approval is not the same as his. And I haven't even touched on the fact that the late George Harrison is also "present" in the song, via some of his harmonies that were snatched from an earlier Beatles song and adjusted to fit the new key. The Beatles fan in me certainly loves that we have new music from the greatest pop-rock group of all time. However, just because that we can resurrect the voice of a dead artist and enjoy it in a way that he or she might not have wanted doesn't mean that we should.

The post I’ve loved The Beatles for 30+ years, but I’m sorry – Now and Then did not deserve a Grammy appeared first on BGR.

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I’ve loved The Beatles for 30+ years, but I’m sorry – Now and Then did not deserve a Grammy originally appeared on BGR.com on Sun, 2 Feb 2025 at 20:35:06 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.