Welcoming Our Robot Overlords?

ABC News Radio gave me a buzz last week to discuss the new Beatles song. Yep. I had the delight of chatting to Sarah Hall about the ‘new’ song, and how AI plays into it all.

Some background for any of you confused by the advent of a new Beatles song in 2023: this 12-minute official short film explains the story. Essentially, the remaining members of The Beatles attempted to record a new track in the nineties using a home demo of John Lennon. Lennon was singing and playing piano at the same time, and because of this they were unable to separate them for a clean song. They did manage to record George Harrison’s guitar parts before he passed away in 2001. Fast forward many years, and Peter Jackson (yes, that Peter Jackson) used AI to clean up the Lennon audio. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were able to use the AI-tidied Lennon and the 90s studio version of Harrison to finally finish the song.

It’s been interesting to see the comments on the track out there, including these:

There were many comments from people deriding the use of AI, but on a positive note, those who took the time to review what was happening understood that it was technically AI. It wasn’t generative AI doing creative work, but rather highly technical AI cleaning up audio—something that would be impossible for a human to do without AI technology.

It’s natural for us humans to feel threatened. AI is new and shiny. We are figuring out our limits of what we feel comfortable with. But let’s not put all AI into one bucket. There are so many different types of AI that we can use, and the same tool can be used in myriad ways. Some are ethical, some are clearly problematic, and there are many shades of grey in between.

I’m definitely not ready to bow down to robot overlords, however I am ready and willing to delegate work to my robot minions. Bring it on.