Peter Jackson
Director
Lord of the Rings director whose team built machine-learning restoration tools for They Shall Not Grow Old and The Beatles: Get Back — AI used to recover the past rather than generate a synthetic one.
In his words
We developed a machine learning system that we taught what a guitar sounds like, what a bass sounds like, what a voice sounds like. In fact we taught the computer what John sounds like and what Paul sounds like.
To me the sound restoration is the most exciting thing. We made some huge breakthroughs in audio.
Biography
Peter Jackson (born 1961) went from splatter comedies made in his parents’ New Zealand kitchen to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, whose final chapter swept eleven Academy Awards. Through Weta, the effects empire he co-founded, he has spent his career building the technology his films needed when it did not exist.
Teaching machines to hear the Beatles
For They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), Jackson’s team used computational restoration to transform jerky, silent First World War footage into fluid, colorized film. That work led Apple Corps to hand him 60 hours of 1969 Beatles footage for Get Back (2021), where his team’s custom machine-learning “demixing” system separated mono recordings into clean stems — isolating voices from guitars, and even distinguishing John from Paul — revealing conversations buried under studio noise for half a century.
The same MAL (Machine Audio Learning) technology then extracted John Lennon’s vocal from a rough 1977 cassette demo, making possible “Now and Then” (2023) — billed as the last Beatles song, and a Grammy winner. Paul McCartney himself had to clarify to alarmed fans that nothing was synthesized: the AI recovered a real performance, it did not fabricate one.
That distinction defines Jackson’s position in the AI debate. He has not championed generative AI or synthetic performances; his enthusiasm is for machine learning as a restoration instrument — technology in service of archives, memory, and craft. It is a narrower embrace than Silicon Valley’s, but an embrace all the same.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/peter-jackson