Paul McCartney has attempted to clarify the news of him using AI to release “the last Beatles record.” Posting a statement to his website, McCartney writes, “We’ve seen some confusion and speculation about it. Seems to be a lot of guess work out there. Can’t say too much at this stage but to be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It’s all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings — a process which has gone on for years.”

Here’s the full statement:

Been great to see such an exciting response to our forthcoming Beatles project. No one is more excited than us to be sharing something with you later in the year.

We’ve seen some confusion and speculation about it. Seems to be a lot of guess work out there. Can’t say too much at this stage but to be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It’s all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings – a process which has gone on for years.

We hope you love it as much as we do. More news in due course – Paul

Initially, McCartney had been speaking to the BBC about how AI technology was being used to “extricate” the voice of John Lennon from an old demo. “…We were able to use that kind of thing when Peter Jackson did the film Get Back, where it was us making the Let It Be album,” he said earlier in the month. “He was able to extricate John’s voice from a rumpy little bit of cassette that had John’s voice and a piano. He could separate them with AI, and he could tell the machine, ‘That’s a voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.’ And he did that, so it has great uses.

“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had, that we worked on. We just finished it up. It’ll be released this year. We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure, through this AI, so then we could mix the record as you would normally do.”

From the clarifying verbiage — “nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It’s all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings” — it sounds like some AI-assisted studio engineering, not necessarily recreating Lennon’s vocal. At least that’s my take.