The voice in a new song making the rounds on social media sounds eerily like John Lennon’s, and it’s raising so many questions.
The “final” song from The Beatles is reportedly being released to the public any day now, following ex-Beatle Paul McCartney’s remarks earlier this year that the mystery track was made possible thanks to artificial intelligence. He’s since clarified that, no, that doesn’t mean there was anything “artificially” created for the song — just that AI has been mainly used to clean up and edit what’s believed to be the tune Now and Then, an unfinished John Lennon piano-and-voice demo from 1979.
The song’s release comes, also, at quite an interesting time — against the backdrop of a broader discussion about the implications of AI for all kinds of creators, and amid the question of whether we’re all hurtling toward a future in which AI will eventually supplant everyone from writers to actors and musicians. In fact, this is one of the sticking points at the heart of the dual strikes still ongoing in Hollywood. The music industry, meanwhile, is reportedly starting to freak out over yet another concern related to AI — as demonstrated by the new song, below, that on first blush sounds like a John Lennon track.
Take a listen to the song — titled Everybody But You, which has been astonishing listeners across social media — and see what you think. TikTok user Kid Klava recently uploaded that Lennon-sounding track and explained how it came together, the finished product being vastly different from all the other AI-generated music that at this point I’m sure many of you have heard being shared on the Internet.
Long story short, the brief tune above was written and sung by an actual person — who then, basically, told a computer to make the voice sound like Lennon’s.
