AI might help the Beatles win their final Grammy. Will more veteran acts follow?

The record of the year category for the 2025 Grammys is full of zesty pop hits from young female acts such as Chappell Roan, Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter. There’s also Kendrick Lamar’s operatically vicious “Not Like Us” and some poignant, expansive work from Beyoncé and Billie Eilish.

Then there’s the Beatles’ “Now and Then.” The quartet is back on the Grammy leaderboard a full six decades after winning their first statuette. “Now and Then,” salvaged from a famously muddy demo from John Lennon, was made possible with the AI-driven, instrument-isolating mix technology first showcased in the documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back.”

Not even the deaths of Lennon and George Harrison could stand in the way of the most tantalizing prospect in rock — a new and final Beatles single, featuring all four members together.

The Recording Academy lauded the single with record and rock performance nominations. The music industry saw the achievements of “Now and Then” as a major feat of production technology and songcraft. But the academy has also set hard rules around where AI can aid in making music and where it’s disqualifying.

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“Now and Then” is perhaps the best-case scenario for AI’s place in music. It’s a lost pearl of music history, made possible through subtle technology that illuminates, rather than generates. But will its Grammy success open the floodgates for more veteran artists to do the impossible — access and alter old recordings so that the past is never truly put to rest?

“I think AI is a bit like nuclear power. It can split the atom — is that a good idea? Yes if you’re creating energy, but no if it’s a bomb,” said Giles Martin, producer of “Now and Then” and son of the Beatles’ longtime producer George Martin. “For me, when I listen to to John’s voice, without fabrication, I felt like I was with him. That’s almost the opposite of AI.”

The Beatles show off their MBE medals after the royal investiture at Buckingham Palace, London, Tuesday 26th October 1965. The Beatles, each is now a Member of the Order of the British Empire. Pictured at news press conference held at the Saville Theatre. (Photo by Barham/Tony Eyles/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

(Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

In 2023, the Recording Academy laid out ground rules for how music can incorporate artificial intelligence and still be eligible for awards. The rules say that “only human creators” can win Grammys, and “The human authorship component of the work submitted must be meaningful.”

“A work that contains no human authorship is not eligible in any category,” the academy said.

“Now and Then,” released in November 2023, was never at risk there. The song, a home demo Lennon recorded in 1978, was well known to Beatles die-hards. The surviving members even took a crack at properly recording and mixing it in 1995, to little avail. For decades, the song was a holy grail for Fab Four devotees, the last song the whole band could conceivably all participate in.

It took the advanced vocal-isolation technology developed for Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary, “The Beatles: Get Back,” coupled with McCartney and Ringo Starr’s enthusiasm for the song and Martin’s deeply intimate mix work (with a team of engineers), for the prize to come into reach.

“[Jackson] was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropy little bit of cassette,” McCartney told the BBC at the time. “We had John’s voice and a piano, and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.’

“It’s kind of scary but exciting, because it’s the future,” he continued. “We’ll just have to see where that leads.”

But the premise of incorporating an extremely controversial — even frightening — sphere of technology into a catalog as globally cherished as the Beatles’ initially left some fans unnerved. Martin and the musicians were quick to underline that the “AI” was more or less a superpowered version of common mixing tools, not the voice-emulating or song-generating software often associated with the worst of artificial intelligence in music.

“It’s a bit like Pompeii. Researchers found an amazing villa with a spa using new techniques to make an amazing discovery,” Martin said. “That’s the way I see what we’ve done. That building existed, so did John’s song. We used technology to clean it.”

The use of AI on “Now and Then” is “a bit like Pompeii,” said Giles Martin. “That building existed. So did John’s song.”

(Evan Agostini/Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

The single — a beguilingly modest ballad with the band’s hallmark vocal harmonies and some wistful strings — put most fears to rest. It continued the Beatles’ lifelong interest in cutting-edge studio technology, from multitrack recording and tape-loop experiments. “When Paul played it to me at Abbey Road, I thought ‘I’m a usurper here; my dad should be around,’” Martin said. “There’s an emotional responsibility to it all, so you just try to do the best you can.”

That investment from the surviving band members and their closest collaborators is a hallmark of ethical AI use, said Daniela Lieja Quintanar, the curator of “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” an interdisciplinary program about art and AI with a strong music component currently showing at REDCAT in downtown L.A.

“When you have protocols and collaboration of the people who own the art or are caretakers of the art of others, the results are positive,” Quintanar said. “Artists and creatives should take agency over technology and hold those who developed it rapidly accountable. That is how many artist communities have been resisting the uses of machine learning by participating, researching, studying and writing rather than rejecting or fearing it.”

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The premise of “Now and Then” worked beautifully (though Jackson’s music video for the single, featuring composited footage of all four members, was met with more mixed reviews). But it does raise new questions as corporate titans in media, tech and beyond push AI into everyday life and artmaking.

Will music begin to see more “lost” projects or canonical recordings revisited and altered, now up for new Grammy acclaim?

“I hope so. Imagine hearing James Brown’s ‘Live at the Apollo’; I’d love to experience that and hear it like I’m there,” Martin said. “I don’t think there should be hard-and-fast rules. But I don’t want a future where you don’t even know who your favorite artist is, or you can have Bob Dylan singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to your kids. Anything generative should be disqualifying, full stop.”

“If I talk to Paul [McCartney], AI doesnt worry him at all,” said Giles Martin. “He says ‘They’re never going to be me’.”

(Associated Press)

Many Grammy voters were thrilled to have a new Beatles single in the world. Yet most academy members would likely not want classic rock perpetually refashioned with AI for an endless nostalgia ouroboros. In 2024, academy membership changes meant that two-thirds of the professionals who chose this year’s Grammy Award nominees were not members of the Recording Academy as recently as 2018.

For the working Grammy voters who may be feeling the cold breath of AI on their career prospects, the excitement around salvaged gems of music history could be tempered by looming threats of redundancy.

“I think the Beatles were an oddly safe choice for this push — they are the biggest band ever, but they can’t release new material,” said Gregory Butler, a media and AI technologist and a composer and producer on multiple Emmy- and Grammy- nominated projects. “I think they split the difference — going big on saying it used AI, and then going small on the description of how it did. It sent a signal that ‘AI is your friend’ to artists and listeners. Does the industry want it? Some, for sure, but it’s coming either way. It’s going to eat huge chunks of work from people who make their living at music.”

If the Beatles were to triumph with record or rock performance wins, it would be a genuinely moving coda to the most acclaimed recording career in pop music. “‘Now and Then’ as the last record, to me, is incredibly poignant, a song that John wrote to Paul,” Martin said. “Paul lost his best friend. Whatever differences they had, they lived an incredibly close life. I think Paul missed him, like he missed my dad. He missed him creatively, and he wanted to work with him again, to collaborate again. This technology was a pathway towards that.”

For now, that personal poignancy and cutting-edge tech can comfortably coexist at the Grammys, which will play a major role to set guardrails of what writing, performing and recording music fundamentally means today. These were questions the Beatles were asking 60 years ago and are again asking in 2025.

“My dad said the Beatles were very lucky. They tapped into every zeitgeist and had this natural ability to change with the seasons of the art they created,” Martin said. “If I talk to Paul, AI doesn’t worry him at all. Paul said ‘They’re never going to be me,’ and he’s right. It’s got executives worried, but at the end of the day, he can say, ‘I’m Paul McCartney.’”