Artificial intelligence technology has been used to sample John Lennon’s voice from a shelved song to create “the last Beatles record,” decades after the band broke up, Paul McCartney said Tuesday.

McCartney, 80, told the BBC that AI technology was used to separate the Beatles’ voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series, “The Beatles: Get Back.”

From there, the idea to reconstruct a 1978 love song by John Lennon began.

McCartney had received cassettes labeled “For Paul” created by Lennon shortly before his death in 1980, from Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono. One of those songs, called “Now and Then,” is likely to be released later this year as the final Beatles song, the BBC reported.

For the documentary series, Jackson was “able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” McCartney told BBC radio. “He could separate them with AI, he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar’.”

“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on,” he added. “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 do. It gives you some sort of leeway.”

This isn’t the first AI infused McCartney and Lennon duet. McCartney used the same technology to sing virtually with Lennon, on “I’ve Got a Feeling” last year at Glastonbury Festival. He also used AI for new surround-sound mixes of the Beatles’ Revolver album last year, according to the Guardian.

McCartney told Q Magazine that some of Lennon’s songs from his cassettes were previously released, but “Now and Then” was put to the side because George Harrison had called it “f*cking rubbish” and refused to work on it, according to McCartney. “The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it,” McCartney said, according to the Guardian.

At the launch of a new book and accompanying photography exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, McCartney expressed that some applications of AI did give him cause for concern.

“I’m not on the internet that much but people will say to me: ‘Oh, yeah, there’s a track where John’s singing one of my songs,’ and it’s just AI … it’s kind of scary but exciting, because it’s the future. We’ll just have to see where that leads,” said McCartney, according to the Guardian.

Associated Press material was used in this report.