Written By
Dr. Michael West
Instructor,
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
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Approved by faculty for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences on Aug. 30, 2024.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Grand Canyon University. Any sources cited were accurate as of the publish date.
An increasingly pressing technological advancement for instructors and students alike that is still in the process of taking shape, is how, when or if to use AI writing programs. There is consternation that AI writing programs will replace the human spirit and intellect, and more specifically for undergraduates, AI will be used in unethical ways that might offer rewards in the short term. For example, if usage is not detected, AI will inhibit the intellectual growth required for the job market after graduation.
The unstoppable force of AI is something that instructors, students and administrators alike are trying to wrestle. The questions that revolve around its usage impact everyone in higher education, and they are worth restating here. Although AI’s use by college administrators and instructors typically revolves around schedule planning, meeting preparation and class preparation, its use by students is less certain and potentially more damaging, depending on its function.
The inquiries around students using AI programs, which preclude the understanding that AI cannot be fully prohibited, include, but are not limited to, such questions as:
This article will explore how instructors and students within the field of the humanities, which prioritizes the human creative and social experiences, can all take a cue from the Beatles in how to use AI technology: to assist and enhance, not to replace, the production of our creative endeavors. We can utilize AI humanities to help us learn how to use AI.
Although the answers to these questions will be works in progress in the coming years as we all adjust to AI, there is a current example that offers a best-case scenario for how to use an AI program, and it comes from the most successful rock ‘n’ roll group in history, The Beatles, in their last official release, “Now & Then,” from November 2023.
The Beatles might seem like an unlikely source for how to deal with AI, but their past use of tech in their recording processes in the mid-to-late 1960s put them at the forefront of how to incorporate tech with human endeavors such as songwriting, performing and recording. With the help of director Peter Jackson and his machine-assisted learning (MAL) audio computer program, they have been replicating those advanced uses of tech and showing us all how we can use AI to enhance the reflection of our human experience in our art without replacing us altogether.
In June 2023, Paul McCartney announced that he, Ringo Starr and producer Giles Martin, son of former Beatles producer George Martin, had finished the recording for what would be the final Beatles song, penned and recorded into a boombox by John Lennon in the late 1970s, entitled “Now & Then.” The song, released on November 2, 2023, was the last of three songs that Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono gave to McCartney, George Harrison and Starr in the mid-1990s on a cassette tape for the three surviving members to complete and use for the Beatles’ Anthology albums and films. The career spanning documentary was initially only slated to use backing music by the surviving members, but once they started jamming together, they realized they wanted to create something new.
McCartney and Harrison separately approached Ono about any demo tapes left behind by Lennon recorded before his murder in December 1980. She gave them a demo with three songs, “Free as a Bird, “Real Love” and “Now & Then,” all written and recorded around 1977 (some sources say a fourth song called “Grow Old With Me” was included). The three surviving Beatles, with producer Jeff Lynne, used the best-existing technology at the time to use Lennon’s piano and vocals from the rough-sounding cassette tape demo in newly recorded tracks that featured additional songwriting elements to Lennon’s demos. “Free as a Bird” was released with a music video in 1995 for the first volume in the Anthology series, and “Real Love” was released with a video for the second volume of Anthology in 1996.1,2
The songs represented the best possible scenario for a collaboration between the Beatles’ main songwriters Lennon and McCartney, the most successful songwriting duo in music history. The recordings of Lennon, however, were still rough sounding. The poor quality of the cassette tape and the background hissing of Lennon’s apartment appliances were noticeable but overlooked. Hearing the Beatles in new songs in the mid-1990s was a gift to their fans, and the poor quality of Lennon’s piano and voice were not enough to prohibit the songs from working on a musical and technical level.
The “Now and Then” Beatles song, however, was too unfinished and the quality was too poor for McCartney, Harrison and Starr to do anything with besides laying down basic recording tracks. Lennon had at least one section down, where he’s singing the title “Now & Then,” but the rest of the song featured Lennon’s mumbling as he was in the act of figuring out the lyrics as he was playing the song. Harrison recorded an acoustic guitar part, but he was not a fan of either the song or the state of the unfinished demo. (It’s unclear.) They scrapped work on “Now & Then” after one afternoon as a result.
While in London working on his colorized and digitized World War I documentary, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, stopped by the Beatles’ recording company, Apple Records. He was initially invited to meet Apple executives for his advice about a possible virtual reality exhibit of the Beatles. Instead, Jackson inquired about footage from a 1970 Beatles film entitled “Let It Be.” The film and album were notorious for representing the time period in January 1969 when the Beatles, the most popular and influential music group in the world, were breaking up.3
The initial project of the film and album “Let It Be” was to show the Beatles in the process of writing an album of 14 songs then performing it in concert within about a two-week time span. The version of the “Let It Be” film released in 1970, however, mainly showed the times when the Beatles, under immense pressure to write and perform new material while being filmed, were bickering with each other. George Harrison famously quit the band for a few days during this time.
Jackson knew there was a lot more footage shot of the group that did not make the final film cut, and he inquired about it to the Apple executives. He was given access to more than 60 hours of footage, and what he saw was markedly different from what was released in “Let It Be.” Rather than showing a snapshot of when the Beatles were breaking up, he found reels of film showing the band still at their creative peak, relaxed, engaging, under a lot of stress, but having fun, too.
He approached Paul McCartney, who apparently had never seen the original “Let It Be” film and thought the remaining footage would be dreadful and convinced him to let him use the previously unseen footage to create a new documentary that showed the Beatles in a more positive light during the “Let It Be” writing and recording sessions.
For the editing of the film, Jackson and his team at Park Road Post Production, in New Zealand, digitized the film reels, and then developed a machine-learning computer, or MAL, program to teach it to identify the different parts of the Beatles’ music. So, they taught the machine “this is a guitar,” or “this is Paul’s bass,” or “this is John’s voice.” By doing so, they were then able to isolate each sound of the songs. This groundbreaking technology has been used by the Beatles and producer Giles Martin to begin to remaster their old albums. In doing so, the improved quality of the old Beatles albums has been giving fans a way to hear the band like never before.
After the release of Jackson’s documentary, entitled "Get Back," McCartney approached him and Giles Martin about using MAL to fix up the last remaining demo of Lennon’s composition “Now & Then” from the Anthology days. For the first time, they were able to isolate Lennon’s vocals on “Now & Then” and remove the piano and background noises and improve the quality of his voice. The results are astounding. Lennon sounds like he was present in the room at the time of the remaining Beatles finishing the song.
Harrison, who died in 2001 of cancer, had only previously recorded an acoustic guitar track for the song. As the band’s lead guitarist, he was unable to re-record his part, so McCartney, a great guitar player himself, recorded the lead guitar in homage to Harrison, his bass part, Ringo re-recorded his drums, and the two of them recorded backing vocals. They also added backing vocals from past Beatles songs “Here, There, and Everywhere,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Because.”
The Beatles are the fitting band to be the first to use AI to complete and enhance a demo recording of a deceased member of the group. “Now & Then,” the remastered Beatles albums featuring Jackson’s MAL tech, and “Get Back” are introducing, or re-introducing, the band in a new way in this age of AI. It continues the practice of using advanced forms of technology to create something new and unique they started in the 1960s. The Beatles pioneered recording technologies such as stacking tracks of instruments (which caused their old records to sound compressed), speeding up or slowing down tape, recording tracks and playing the tape backwards, or splicing together various sounds to create avant-garde soundscapes. The Beatles AI use is simply a continuation of their pioneering techniques in the 1960s.
In June 2023, while McCartney was announcing the impending release of the Beatles "Now & Then" that November, he put to bed any fears that the band used AI in unethical ways to create a “fake” Beatles record. Examples of “fake” AI Beatles songs include the Beatles covering Nirvana songs or the Beatles playing Live Aid in 1985. These examples of AI-created songs, along with other versions including new songs written in the mode of specific artists created entirely by AI, represent the feared misuse of AI.
McCartney was very careful to quell any fears that “Now & Then” was not actually a real Beatles song. In an interview with the BBC radio show, “Best of Today,” he stated, “‘It’s a very interesting thing, it’s something we’re all sort of tackling at the moment and trying to deal with. All of that (Lennon’s vocals fixed by AI) is kind of scary, but exciting because it’s the future….There’s a good side to it, and then a scary side, and we’ll just have to see where that leads’”.4,5,6,7
In discussing their use of AI and whether “Now & Then” constitutes an actual Beatles song, McCartney captured how we’re all discussing how to use AI, including for students at GCU. Instructors are trying to deal with the fact that AI exists and is out there for students to use in harmful ways, and we’re trying to mitigate that by acknowledging and adapting to its useful side. We’re in a liminal stage right now between pre-AI and current-AI days, and while we want students to create their own work that represents their maturation intellectually and spiritually, we can’t ignore the fact that AI can be used to enhance their learning, like it was used to enhance John Lennon’s old demo to create something unique.
What that looks like or, to McCartney’s point, where that leads is still undecided. While AI cannot be used to write entire essays for students, it could be used to enhance the processes that lead to the creation of course projects. That could be prepping and planning through outlining and proofreading, or it can be used to generate examples of essays to be analyzed in content and form.
Humanities courses are a vital component of a well-rounded university education for students from all walks of life and all fields. No comprehensive university education can be complete without humanities courses and employers in private industries outside the humanities are ever more aware of the benefits of analyzing the meaning of human endeavors and interactions expressed through religion, philosophy, writing and art.
