Song of the Day 6/6: The Beatles*, “Grow Old With Me”
The asterisk is because this isn’t really the Beatles. People who worry about the AI menace have been too busy fretting about job losses and armageddon to notice it much, but the technology that allows for deep fakes is about to disrupt the music industry, too.
One of the demos of this John Lennon song, recorded several times for possible inclusion on “Double Fantasy,” was released on the posthumous “Milk and Honey” LP in 1984. It’s been released in several forms, many enhanced with studio technology, over the years, and by several artists, including Ringo Starr. But this version uses AI technology to recreate the sound of the Beatles, best illustrated at 1:43 when “Paul McCartney” takes the lead vocal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqtgWShoAv4
As you can imagine, this has the potential to open a can of worms the size of a grain silo for copyright attorneys. Meanwhile, we can look forward to hearing more resurrected rock stars singing songs they never sang — Jim Morrison seems like a natural, and I’ll wager AI can imitate Hendrix better than any human can. At least until the litigation begins.
Not bad, and this is just the start. Music is only the tip of the deceit iceberg at this point, suspect the real block busters are still to come.
Great music and great songs capture the zeitgeist of their time and speak to the human experience of people living in a specific time and space. I can’t see how any AI gets good enough to approximate that. Interesting curiosities…sure.
But if we get to the point where AI produces all the music then the zeitgeist would feature only AI music. Older listeners would miss the kind of AI music they liked in their youth. Or maybe that’s just a lame sci-fi plot I heard about.
Obviously AI music should be reviewed by AI bots.