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Who just won the first Grammy for an AI-assisted song?

Answer: The Beatles.

Closeup of yellow and orange sound waves coming out of a person's mouth as they are speaking. Black background.
Shutterstock/ESB Professional
Fifty-five years after the famous band broke up, The Beatles have become the first to win a Grammy for a song that was assisted by artificial intelligence. The song, “Now and Then,” won the award for Best Rock Performance.

First released in November 2023, “Now and Then” features the vocals of John Lennon even though he died in 1980. The Beatles used artificial intelligence to clean up an old recording of Lennon singing and playing piano for the song. Using AI in this way is in keeping with Grammy guidelines, which mandate that human creators only are eligible but that “elements of AI material” are permitted in certain categories.

“Now and Then” was also nominated for Record of the Year, but it lost to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” In a short 12-minute film about how the track was made, Lennon’s son Sean said he thought his dad would have appreciated how modern technology was able to bring his voice to a new song. “My dad would have loved that, because he was never shy to experiment with recording technology. I think it's really beautiful.”