The Beatles are back, sort of. The fab four just released a new song, the group's first since 1995. "Now and Then" is being advertised as the final Beatles track, which makes sense given that two of the members have passed and the other two are well over 80 years old. The song was built using a demo track from John Lennon dating back to the 1970s and a guitar track from George Harrison from 1995. The surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, finished off the tune with the help of modern machine learning technology.

When researchers recently unveiled the first pop song composed by an artificial intelligence (AI) system, some creative types may have been nervous about the idea of robots taking over their jobs. But how exactly was AI used to write a song? A team from the Sony CSL Research Lab used a system called Flow Machines to compose the new record, titled "Daddy's Car." The song sounds like a lost Beatles track from the late 1960s, or perhaps a composition by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. François Pachet, the project's lead researcher, told Live Science that the song wasn't created by an AI entirely from scratch, so composers can breathe easy -- at least for now.