The Beatles were nominated for two Grammy Awards this year, and no, I didn’t accidentally fall into a 1960s time warp. The Beatles song”Now and Then,” refined with the use of AI and released last year, is up for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance. So the fab four will be up against the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Beyoncé, setting the tone for a pretty weird Grammys moment.

Although the band broke up fifty years ago, Paul McCartney decided to use AI last year to create “the last Beatles album.” McCartney doesn’t use this technology to resurrect his late bandmates John Lennon and George Harrison with deepfakes. Instead, McCartney took one of Lennon’s 1978 demos and used AI to clean up the recording’s poor sound quality.

McCartney was inspired by director Peter Jackson’s film “The Beatles: Come Back,” the 2021 docu-series based on archival footage of the recording sessions for “Let It Be.” These 1969 recordings didn’t sound very good, but the film’s dialogue editor, Emile de la Rey, used AI to recognize each of the Beatles’ voices and isolate them from the background noise. The same technology helped producer Giles Martin create a new stereo mix for the Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver.

This AI-based audio editing is similar to how video chat platforms like FaceTime, Google Meet, or Zoom might filter out background noise from a call. Machine learning models can be trained on something in particular—whether it’s a human voice on a video call or a certain type of guitar in a studio—and learn to isolate those sounds from the rest of a recording.

Can other nominees like Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar stand a chance against the Beatles at the Grammys? Perhaps the real question is whether the Beatles can win on novelty alone – of all the songs nominated for Record of the Year, ‘Now and Then’ has the fewest Spotify streams to 78 million. If the Beatles are “more popular than Jesus”, then so is Charli XCX now.