Former Beatle Paul McCartney Says AI Could ‘Rip Off’ Future Musicians

Paul McCartney has said that AI could “rip off” future generations of musicians, the BBC reports. McCartney is one of two surviving members of The Beatles, who sold over 1 billion records and were one of the most popular musical groups of all time.

“You get young guys, girls, coming up, and they write a beautiful song, and they don’t own it,” he said on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. “They don’t have anything to do with it. And anyone who wants can just rip it off.

“The truth is, the money’s going somewhere. Somebody’s getting paid, so why shouldn’t it be the guy who sat down and wrote ‘Yesterday?’,” a reference to one of The Beatles hit songs.

The UK government is currently consulting on a scheme that would allow AI companies to scrape content from publishers and artists to train their models unless they “opt-out.” The proposal has already seen significant opposition from some members of the UK creative industries, who have dubbed it unfair.

McCartney was clear about his thoughts on the topic, saying: “We’re the people, you’re the government! You’re supposed to protect us. That’s your job.”

He added the government needs to “protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not going to have them.”

Many AI-music creation tools have already been hit by lawsuits alleging that the tools deprived artists of their income. In June 2024, the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued two AI music generation companies, Suno and Udio, for using unlicensed music created by artists like The Beach Boys and Abba to create songs.

It’s not just high-profile figures within the music industry who are warning about the future impact of AI on artists; plenty of important figures in film and TV, publishing, and journalism are taking legal action to stop AI from depriving creators of their money.

In March, three novelists launched a class-action lawsuit aimed at Nvidia over its NeMo Megatron AI model. The authors argued that Nvidia used their work to train its model and has therefore violated their books’ copyright protections. Meanwhile, The New York Times is still engaged in a lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which accuses it of copyright infringement by using its materials to train its large language model.

But The Beatles themselves haven’t been above using AI to create music; in 2023 they used AI software to take deceased Beatle John Lennon’s vocals from a low-quality demo and revamped it into a fully fledged new track.

About Will McCurdy

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I’m a reporter covering weekend news. Before joining PCMag in 2024, I picked up bylines in BBC News, The Guardian, The Times of London, The Daily Beast, Vice, Slate, Fast Company, The Evening Standard, The i, TechRadar, and Decrypt Media.

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