Radio host David Greene says Google's NotebookLM tool stole his voice

Nor does it seem like his voice but changed "just enough" (like in pitch).

I agree, he just has a very generic-sounding "podcast guy" voice. And obviously, NotebookLM trained on tons of podcasts and is generating a highly generic, average-sounding voice. Which is why it's pitched higher, since David Greene has a lower than average pitch.

This lawsuit is either just to generate buzz to build his personal brand, or maybe he's worried about the competitive threat from AI. But there's no way he's going to win this suit. This isn't like the case with Bette Midler, where Ford intentionally hired someone to mimic her voice.

So I would say that where there is smoke there is sometimes fire at this point.

As @crazygringo said, David's voice is lower. I think it might have some of the same harmonics, but it has some lower ones too, which make the overall sound come across as lower-pitched. I'm not using technical terminology here, so perhaps someone can jump in with the appropriate terms.

There are going to be countless people that think AI is using their voice. Humans share remarkably similar voices, but obviously you can’t copy that (other than impersonations, obviously).

Unless there is evidence that a company intentionally went after a specific human voice to train their AI, there’s no reason to report on these people claiming AI is using their voice.

Maybe if it’s someone with a very distinctive voice. But this guy, as the OP said, just has a “generic podcast guy” voice.

Btw, are you sure that is the part David Greene is upset about? The NotebookLLM hosts will vary their voice, and jump into and out of different voices in a glitchy manner sometimes.

Why is everybody so inclined to defend NotebookLLM here? I've heard Chris Fisher and other Jupiter Broadcasting hosts mimicked , but also leo Laporte (from TWIT) for example. It's obvious it is trained on a lot of open podcasting material and clones a voice every now and then.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yL2GezneU

As the article notes, the AI doesn't even have to be trained on Greene's voice for him to have a case.

> Grimmelmann said Greene doesn’t necessarily have to show definitively that Google trained NotebookLM on his voice to have a case, or even that the voice is 100 percent identical to his. He cited a 1988 case in which the singer and actress Bette Midler successfully sued Ford Motor Company over a commercial that used a voice actor to mimic her distinctive mezzo-soprano. But Greene would then have to show that enough listeners assume it’s Greene’s voice for it to affect either his reputation or his own opportunities to capitalize on it.

But I am also very anti-AI in the artistic space, because if it weren’t for humans freely providing so much artistic content, we wouldn’t have this outcome. And I believe the only end result will be less humans openly sharing knowledge, because some heavily money backed entities will just steal all the art and put it behind a paywall or advertisement.

As much as I appreciate the easy search (because actual useful search has become nonexistent since AI) and the ability to ask AI to find some metadata from a large data payload, I also dislike AI, because it has effectively broken the open internet and the willingness for humans to be open to freely sharing knowledge.

I kept listening waiting to hear the voice that was supposed to sound like him, and never did.

Was it the first one (I heard three different voices during the clip)? That one is considerably deeper than the podcaster's voice, and has different tones, too. It definitely wasn't the last one, that one was much higher pitched (and then a female voice in the middle).

Feels like a big stretch, to say the least. But I can tell a big difference between the two.

Ultimately, it's like some of the music copyright lawsuits, where they're suing over chord progression. There are a billion voices on the planet -- any AI generated voice is going to sound similar to someone else's real voice (and again, I don't hear it at all in this case).

EDIT: So it's the third voice apparently. The pitch is close, but the tones and accents still definitely feel "off" enough that it doesn't sound like they were intentionally going for this guy. It still feels like a stretch to me, but not as much as the first voice did.

But it is always possible that this is what Chris sounds like in his own head. Nobody listening to audio will hear it the way he does.

It doesn't matter whether it sounds distinctive to you. What matters is whether it's close enough to the real person's voice to be an infringement.

Just like it doesn't matter if you used a machine to duplicate a painting. It's still an infringement.

You can't publish a Harry Potter novel and then throw up your hands and say, "It wasn't me. The AI decided to name the characters Hargid and Hermione and Snape."

Google says it paid a voice actor. If it provides proof of that, good. But like with a lot of AI things, we're in new territory here.

Seems like there's a market for a tool that can compare an AI voice to a library of known famous voices so that companies like Google can tweak their machines to not sound too much like someone who can be harmed by a sound-alike.

However, the equation changes considerably when the voice becomes familiar. You can imagine it like going from CPU to an ASIC. The brain is rather good at telling when a voice is your friend or not, the evolutionary pressure should be clear. Therefore, the people most qualified to speak on this matter will be first and foremost Greene and his podcast fans. It's a matter of exposure.

Even if it is complete chance, there's no way to peer inside and confirm that because these things are completely opaque black boxes