Paul McCartney has announced a final ‘new’ Beatles song, created via AI extraction – but as ever, it seems to be a response to fan-made videos doing the same thing – even the announcement came about a month after Dae Lims very moving Beatles AI recreation of a John Lennon demo ‘Grow Old With Me’. I suspect this is what will pop up later in the year. This in itself bar the AI part is not new – remember Free As A Bird in 1995? But as thw video response below points out, there are legal and moral implications here. In fact Dae Lims who made the original took it down, but thankfully others have reposted it. It’s beautiful and amazingly done….I suspect using some of the singing AI clones as well as maybe re-singing it and cloning that to John’s voice, or mixing the two. Most of these ‘recreations’ and sound-a-likes are pretty meh, but this is really good. Would not be surprised if Paul et al are working with this person for a professional release. This comes after the Fake Drake song and Fake Eminem tracks and more popping up on the internet, and it seems like the tech won’t go away. I’ve talked about the Future of AI here for podcasting and music, some of it is highly worrying, some of it isn’t. It won’t replace a decent musician (that fact the above video points out, there’s an obvious human touch here, you can’t yet just get AI to pump out new Beatles songs and expect anything good) or artists. At all. And that should never be the aim. But as a tool, I think it’s going to be really amazing where this technology goes. And worrying – voice clones are already an issue with Voice ID for instance (my fellow podcasters: DON’T use voice ID on your phone banking!). Sadly the two go hand in hand.