David Greene Sues Google Over NotebookLM AI Voice, Claims Unauthorized Replication

Longtime NPR host David Greene sues Google over NotebookLM voice | TechCrunch

David Greene, the longtime host of NPR's "Morning Edition," is suing Google, alleging that the male podcast voice in the company's NotebookLM tool is based on Greene, according to The Washington Post. Greene said that after friends, family members, and coworkers began emailing him about the resemblance, he became convinced that the voice was replicating his cadence, intonation, and use of filler words like "uh." "My voice is, like, the most important part of who I am," said Greene, who currently hosts the KCRW show "Left, Right, & Center." Among other features, Google's NotebookLM allows users to generate a podcast with AI hosts. A company spokesperson told the Post that the voice used in this product is unrelated to Greene's: "The sound of the male voice in NotebookLM's Audio Overviews is based on a paid professional actor Google hired." This isn't the first dispute over AI voices resembling real people. In one notable example, OpenAI removed a ChatGPT voice after actress Scarlett Johansson complained that it was an imitation of her own.

Google Sued by Former NPR Host Over NotebookLM AI Voice

A lawsuit by radio host David Greene alleges that Google used his voice to train its AI. Google denies the allegation. A former NPR radio host has sued Google and its parent company Alphabet, alleging that the tech giant used his voice for its NotebookLM AI product. David Greene, former host of NPR's Morning Edition and current host of KCRW's Left, Right & Center, filed the lawsuit in California Superior Court in Santa Clara County. "Google used Mr. Greene's voice without authorization and then used those stolen copies to develop, train, and refine its AI broadcasting product, NotebookLM," the lawsuit alleges. NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant that generates insights from data that you input into the system. Google last year introduced audio and video overviews for NotebookLM. In the case of the former, someone using the software can generate an AI podcast based on information in a file you upload. Greene says that others began informing him after the fall 2024 addition of the feature that one of the voices in those podcasts sounded a lot like his. "These allegations are baseless," a Google spokesperson told CNET. "The sound of the male voice in NotebookLM's Audio Overviews is based on a paid professional actor Google hired." Google has not identified the voice actor that it says it paid for work on NotebookLM. According to the lawsuit, Greene said he hired an independent forensic software company that specializes in voice recognition to compare his voice to the one in question on NotebookLM. "The company conducted a thorough analysis of the voice similarity between Mr. Greene's voice and the voice used in NotebookLM," the lawsuit says. "The tests indicated a confidence rating of 53%-60% (on a -100% to 100% scale) that Mr. Greene's voice was used to train the software driving NotebookLM." The voices of professional voice actors or celebrities have been the subject of previous complaints, lawsuits and licensing deals. In 2024, Scarlett Johansson raised concerns about an OpenAI voice that sounded similar to hers. The company removed the sound-alike. Last year, ElevenLabs struck a deal to license voices from celebrities including Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine.

NPR's David Greene is suing Google over its AI podcast voice.

The former host of Morning Edition and current host of Left, Right & Center claims that Google illegally replicated his voice for its male podcast host in NotebookLM. Google denies this, but Greene (and many of his friends and colleagues) say the resemblance is "uncanny." As the Washington Post reports: To Greene, the resemblance of the AI voice to his own is uncanny -- and the harm is deeper and more personal than just a missed chance to capitalize on his most recognizable asset. "My voice is, like, the most important part of who I am," Greene said.

Former NPR Host Accuses Google Of Copying His Voice For AI Offering

Podcaster David Greene is accusing Google of using his voice without permission to create one of the AI voices in the company's research and note-taking tool NotebookLM. Google added Audio Overviews in the second half of 2024, allowing NotebookLM users to make brief podcast episodes out of pages of notes and documents of any kind. The AI-generated podcasts typically have one male and one female cohost. Greene is now claiming that the male co-host was clearly trained on hours of his hard work, which it allegedly now mimics, and he is suing the company for failing to get his permission or offering him any compensation. "Without his consent, Google sought to replicate Mr. Greene's distinctive voiceâ€"a voice made iconic over decades of decorated radio and public commentaryâ€"to create synthetic audio products that mimic his delivery, cadence, and persona," the complaint filed in a state trial court in Santa Clara County, California claims. Greene was the co-host of NPR's award-winning Morning Edition podcast for roughly a decade, and now he hosts KCRW's Left, Right & Center podcast. Following the release of the AI podcasting feature in 2024, the internet praised how the podcasters sounded more human than expected. At the time, Forbes called the feature "eerily human," while WIRED said that the cadence and vocal performance of the virtual podcasters, and the use of filler words or peculiar phrasing, made the product "stand out." Google has called NotebookLM one of the company's "breakout AI successes." The lawsuit claims that the company "misappropriated a beloved public radio and podcast host's career, identity, and livelihood as raw material for a tech company's bottom line without any compensation." Greene was first alerted to the similarity by colleagues, and he then consulted an AI forensic firm to confirm his suspicions. According to the lawsuit, the tests indicated a 53-60% confidence that the voice was Greene's, with any confidence score above 50% deemed "relatively high." The CEO of the unnamed forensic company eventually concluded that it was their "confident opinion that the Google Podcast model was trained on David Greene's voice," per the lawsuit. “These allegations are baseless," Google spokesperson José Castañeda told Gizmodo. "The sound of the male voice in NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews is based on a paid professional actor Google hired.†The use of intellectual and artistic property has been a huge issue in AI, leading to several high-profile lawsuits aimed at AI industry giants like OpenAI and Google. Models need lots of data for training, but with limited regulatory guardrails, the lines blur when it comes to proper authorization by and compensation for those who have labored to create the stuff it trains on. When it comes to mimicking likenesses, such as in voice or video generation, there is also the added uncanny experience of individuals having to surrender all autonomy over their own voice or image, as users can have the models do and say pretty much anything that they want. In a bit of high-profile fallout in 2024, Scarlett Johansson complained about OpenAI after the company allegedly used or replicated her voice to power a ChatGPT voice, even after the actress (who famously voiced an AI companion in the 2013 movie "Her") declined the company's requests for her participation.

NotebookLM under fire: Popular radio host says Google stole his voice

Google has dismissed the lawsuit as "baseless," asserting that the voice was recorded by a paid professional actor. Google's NotebookLM is one of the best AI tools out there, with features like Audio Overviews and Video Overviews that are a godsend for learning. Not everyone loves NotebookLM, though, and former NPR host David Greene has his own reason to dislike Google's AI tool: It sounds like Google stole his voice, literally. Greene used to host "Morning Edition," which was heard by 13 million listeners from 2012 to 2020, making it the most popular news radio show in America. Greene now hosts the political podcast "Left, Right & Center." As Greene shared with The Washington Post, NotebookLM's male voice sounds eerily like his, from the cadence and intonation to the occasional "uhhs" and "likes" he had worked over the years to minimize but could not eliminate. You can check out David Greene's voice in the video below: Here's NotebookLM's male voice for Audio Overviews in action (at the 4.30 mark): Greene is now suing Google, alleging that it violated his rights by building a product that replicated his voice without payment or permission, giving users the power to make it say things Greene would never say. Greene's lawsuit alleges, without proof, that Google trained NotebookLM on his voice. In a statement, Google called the allegations baseless, noting that the male voice in NotebookLM's Audio Overviews is from a paid professional actor the company hired. This isn't the first time that a famous celebrity has accused an AI company of using their likeness without authorization. In 2024, Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of using a voice eerily similar to hers for one of its ChatGPT-4o voices, "Sky." Reportedly, the company didn't intentionally copy her voice, and the voice-over artist was hired months before Johansson was approached to do the task.

Why your NotebookLM podcast might sound like it's hosted by NPR

Mark has almost a decade of experience reporting on mobile technology, working previously with Digital Trends. Taking a less-than-direct route to technology writing, Mark began his Android journey while studying for a BA in Ancient & Medieval History at university. But since then, he's cast his eyes firmly on the future, with a deep love for anything that bleeps or bloops. Outside of Android tech of all types, Mark loves to hike, play video games, build small plastic men that cost far too much, and spend time with his two daughters. One of NotebookLM's coolest abilities is the way it can create a podcast from the sources you put into it. In this podcast, a pair of generated hosts discuss whatever you've shared with NotebookLM, allowing you to brief yourself on a subject in a way that's familiar and accessible. However, one of the two voices may sound familiar. David Greene, host of NPR's "Morning Edition" and "Left, Right & Center" on KCRW, has accused Google of using his voice to create NotebookLM's male podcast host. Green has opened a case against Google David Greene admits he hadn't heard of NotebookLM until a colleague reached out to him to ask whether he'd lent his voice to Google. But once he'd tried it out for himself, he said it was hard to hear anything but his own voice. "I was, like, completely freaked out," Greene said to The Washington Post. "It's this eerie moment where you feel like you're listening to yourself." According to Greene, friends, colleagues, and even his own family immediately recognized the voice as his own, leading to his decision to open a lawsuit against Google. It's not hard to see why someone who'd built their life, career, and brand around their voice would take this step. If an AI-generated voice is capable of sounding like you and could be made to say anything a user wanted, well, there's a clear chance for harm there. Google has pushed back against these claims, telling The Washington Post that NotebookLM's male voice was trained on a paid male actor's voice, and that the claims were "baseless". Listening to the voice clips provided by The Washington Post's article, it's easy to see the similarities between Greene's voice and the AI voice. Ultimately, it's down to the courts to decide how close the resemblance is, and whether it's a potential risk for Greene's reputation and whether a casual listener would assume it was him. AP Recommends: Subscribe and never miss what matters Tech insights about everything mobile directly from the Android Police team. Subscribe By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime. As AI use becomes more widespread, it seems likely we'll see more of these cases pop-up. There's an immediate similarity to the OpenAI assistant that had a startling resemblance to actor Scarlett Johansson, and sparked a similar legal backlash. There's also a big question of whether current laws are equipped to deal with this sort of situation. At the moment, it's possible current legislation has enough give in it to deal with these sorts of lawsuits, but given how widespread and easy-to-use AI models are becoming, it might be worth considering whether wider controls for LLMs are required.

He spent decades perfecting his voice. Now he says Google stole it.

In his lawsuit, David Greene alleges Google violated his rights by building a product that replicated his voice without payment or permission. (Stephen Voss) David Greene had never heard of NotebookLM, Google's buzzy artificial intelligence tool that spins up podcasts on demand, until a former colleague emailed him to ask if he'd lent it his voice. "So... I'm probably the 148th person to ask this, but did you license your voice to Google?" the former co-worker asked in a fall 2024 email. "It sounds very much like you!" Greene, a public radio veteran who has hosted NPR's "Morning Edition" and KCRW's political podcast "Left, Right & Center," looked up the tool, listening to the two virtual co-hosts -- one male and one female -- engage in light banter. "I was, like, completely freaked out," Greene said. "It's this eerie moment where you feel like you're listening to yourself." Greene felt the male voice sounded just like him -- from the cadence and intonation to the occasional "uhhs" and "likes" that Greene had worked over the years to minimize but never eliminated. He said he played it for his wife and her eyes popped. As emails and texts rolled in from friends, family members and co-workers, asking if the AI podcast voice was his, Greene became convinced he'd been ripped off. Now he's suing Google, alleging that it violated his rights by building a product that replicated his voice without payment or permission, giving users the power to make it say things Greene would never say. Google told The Washington Post in a statement on Thursday that NotebookLM's male podcast voice has nothing to do with Greene. Now a Santa Clara County, California, court may be asked to determine whether the resemblance is uncanny enough that ordinary people hearing the voice would assume it's his -- and if so, what to do about it. The case is the latest to pit the rights of individual human creators against those of a booming AI industry that promises to transform the economy by allowing people to generate uncannily lifelike speech, prose, images and videos on demand. Behind the artificial voices in NotebookLM and similar tools are language models trained on vast libraries of writing and speech by real humans who were never told their words and voices would be used in that way -- raising profound questions of copyright and ownership. From political "voicefakes" to OpenAI touting a female voice for ChatGPT that resembled that of actress Scarlett Johansson, to deepfake scam ads that had a virtual Taylor Swift hawking Le Creuset cookware, the issues raised by Greene's lawsuit are "going to come up a lot," said James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University. A key question for the courts to decide, Grimmelmann said, will be just how closely an AI voice or likeness has to resemble the genuine article in order to count as infringing. Another will be whether Greene's voice is famous enough for ordinary people to recognize it when they listen to NotebookLM and whether he's harmed by the resemblance. Those can be thorny questions when it comes to AI voices. There are software tools that can compare people's voices, but they're more commonly used to find or rule out an exact match between the voices of real humans, rather than a synthetic one. To Greene, the resemblance of the AI voice to his own is uncanny -- and the harm is deeper and more personal than just a missed chance to capitalize on his most recognizable asset. "My voice is, like, the most important part of who I am," Greene said. "These allegations are baseless," Google spokesperson José Castañeda said. "The sound of the male voice in NotebookLM's Audio Overviews is based on a paid professional actor Google hired." Greene's lawyer argues the recordings make the resemblance clear. "We have faith in the court and encourage people to listen to the example audio themselves," said Joshua Michelangelo Stein, a partner at the firm Boies Schiller Flexner, which is also representing book authors in a high-profile AI copyright lawsuit against Meta. David Greene's voice: Google AI voice: NotebookLM's "Audio Overviews" feature made a splash on its 2024 release with AI enthusiasts who shared examples of using it to summarize long documents, replacing dozens of pages of text with a breezy podcast that highlighted the main points. While Google hasn't disclosed how many people use the tool, it emerged as a sleeper hit for the search giant in its race with rivals such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI to capture consumers' imagination. In December 2024, the streaming music leader Spotify used the tool as part of its signature "Spotify Wrapped" feature, offering each user a personalized podcast about their listening habits. Online, users have ventured numerous guesses as to who the AI podcasters' voices most resemble. Several have named Greene, but others have mentioned former tech podcaster Leo Laporte or the comedy podcast "Armchair Expert" co-hosted by Dax Shepard and Monica Padman. As a kid growing up in Pittsburgh, Greene idolized Lanny Frattare, the longtime voice of the city's professional baseball team. "I would sit at Pittsburgh Pirates games and act like I was the play-by-play announcer," he recalled. By high school, he and two friends were doing his school's morning announcements, which they turned into a sort of radio show. He wrote a college application essay about his dream of one day becoming a public radio host -- an essay his mom dug up and sent to him when he landed his first job at NPR in 2005. There, Greene was mentored by Don Gonyea, NPR's longtime national political correspondent. He learned tricks of the trade, like pretending he was addressing a friend in the room, rather than a distant mass audience, so that his voice would sound conversational rather than "broadcastery." Feedback from listeners and interview subjects told Greene his warm baritone had the power to soothe and convey trust and empathy. On "Morning Edition," his was the voice that some 13 million listeners woke up to from 2012 to 2020, according to NPR, making it the most popular news radio show in America. On "Left, Right & Center," he plays the moderate seeking common ground between pundits from the left and right. "I truly believe that conversations have the power to change our lives and change the world," Greene said. "One of the reasons we're in such a polarized environment right now is because people are forgetting the power of talking to one another." That's what makes the feeling that Google has appropriated his voice and turned it into a robot so galling to Greene. "I read an article in the Guardian about how this podcast tool can be used to spread conspiracy theories and lend credibility to the nastier stuff in our society," he said. "For something that sounds like me to be used in service of that was really troubling." Greene's lawsuit, filed last month in Santa Clara County Superior Court, alleges but does not offer proof that Google trained NotebookLM on his voice. The complaint cites an unnamed AI forensic firm that used its software to compare the artificial voice to Greene's. The tool gave a confidence rating of 53 percent to 60 percent that Greene's voice was used to train the model, which it considers "relatively high" confidence for a comparison between a real person's voice and an artificial one. (A confidence score above zero means the voices are similar, while one below zero indicates they're probably different.) 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. Mike Pesca, host of "The Gist" podcast and a former colleague of Greene's at NPR, said he has an ear for voices and a hobby of trying to identify the actors and celebrities behind voice-overs in TV commercials. The first time he heard NotebookLM, Pesca said, "I was immediately like, 'That's David Greene.'" Pesca said he first assumed that Google had intentionally trained the tool on Greene's voice and that Greene had been compensated. "If I was David Greene I would be upset, not just because they stole my voice," Pesca said, but because they used it to make the podcasting equivalent of AI "slop," a term for spammy, commodified content. "They have banter, but it's very surface-level, un-insightful banter, and they're always saying, 'Yeah, that's so interesting.' It's really bad, because what do we as show hosts have except our taste in commentary and pointing our audience to that which is interesting?" Greene is not the first audio professional to complain that his voice was stolen. Numerous voice actors have been dismayed to hear voices that sound like them in various AI tools. But they face uphill battles in court, in part because they are generally not famous figures, even if their voices are familiar, and because many voice actor contracts license their voices for a wide range of uses. Bills introduced in several states and in Congress have sought to regulate the use of people's voices in AI tools. Greene, however, is relying on long-standing state laws that give public figures certain rights to control how their own likenesses are monetized. Adam Eisgrau, who directs AI copyright policy for the center-left tech trade group Chamber of Progress, said he thinks those laws are sufficient to address cases like Greene's without passing new AI laws at the national level. "If a California jury finds that the voice of NotebookLM is fully Mr. Greene's, he may win," Eisgrau said via email. "If they find that it's got attributes he also possesses, but is fundamentally an archetypal anchorperson's tone and delivery it learned from a large dataset, he may not." Greene said he isn't lobbying for new laws that would risk chilling innovation. He just thinks Google should have asked his permission before releasing a product based on a voice that he believes is essentially his. "I'm not some crazy anti-AI activist," he said. "It's just been a very weird experience."

Google responds to claim that it stole David Greene's voice

Greene is the former co-host of NPR's Morning Edition and currently the host of the Left, Right, & Center podcast from the NPR member station KCRW. Greene found out about NotebookLM, which autogenerates podcasts, from a former coworker and was "completely freaked out," he told the Post. The complaint, which was filed on January 23 in California, states that Google "sought to replicate Mr. Greene's distinctive voice -- a voice made iconic over decades of decorated radio and public commentary -- to create synthetic audio products that mimic his delivery, cadence, and persona." The suit claims that Google violated California and common law statutory right to publicity, which concerns unauthorized uses of someone's likeness, and California's unfair competition law. It also alleges that Google unjustly benefited from Greene's voice. Google told the Post and other publications that NotebookLM has nothing to do with Greene. "These allegations are baseless," Google spokesperson José Castañeda told Gizmodo. "The sound of the male voice in NotebookLM's Audio Overviews is based on a paid professional actor Google hired." The use of people's likeness in AI models, as well as the use of copyrighted materials to train models, has been a contentious topic in recent years. In 2024, OpenAI took down its AI-powered voice, Sky, after allegations that it sounded like Scarlett Johansson, who explicitly didn't give the company permission to use her likeness. Several lawsuits have been launched against major tech and AI companies using copyrighted material to train their AI. Back in January, major artists, including Johansson, launched a campaign against AI slop and theft.

'Hey, that's my voice!' Veteran broadcaster claims Google stole his voice for AI tool

Former NPR host David Greene is suing Google after accusing the tech giant of stealing his voice for use in one of its AI-powered tools. Greene, who presented NPR's Morning Edition for eight years until 2020 and now hosts the political podcast Left, Right & Center, told the Washington Post he was "completely freaked out" when he heard the voice used by Google's NotebookLM, a tool that summarizes documents and generates spoken audio overviews -- using a voice that sounds very much like his. Recommended Videos When friends and family started getting in touch to ask him if the voice was his, he decided to sue Google, accusing it of violating his rights by copying his voice for NotebookLM, without asking for his permission or offering any kind of compensation. Google has denied any wrongdoing. "These allegations are baseless," a spokesperson for the company said, adding that the male voice in NotebookLM's audio overviews "is based on a paid professional actor Google hired." It has yet to reveal who that actor is. Take a listen to the voice generated by NotebookLM in the video below (it runs for about eight seconds) and then listen to David Greene's voice in the video below that, and see what you think. NotebookLM : David Greene: Greene's case is the latest to highlight how AI is steadily upending the creative industries, and at the same time upsetting many of those working within them. It also brings to mind a similar case in May 2024 when the actor Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of replicating her voice for use as one of ChatGPT's voices for the chatbot's voice mode. Johansson said she had twice declined requests from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to use her voice, and was shocked when the newly released Sky voice sounded "eerily" or "strikingly" similar to hers and that of her AI character in the 2013 movie Her, about a lonely man who falls in love with an advanced AI operating system called Samantha. Lawyers representing the actor demanded explanations about how the voice was created. OpenAI responded by removing the voice, claiming that it came from a different professional actress, not Johansson, and insisting that it was never intended to mimic her. As for Greene, he also has concerns about how Google's NotebookLM tool -- using a voice that sounds very much like his -- can be used to spread the kind of conspiracy theories that he would never personally give any credence to, with some listeners possibly believing that he's doing just that. Unless some kind of settlement is reached beforehand, it'll be up to a California court to decide if Google has infringed on Greene's rights to his voice or likeness.

A radio host is suing Google for an AI-generated voice he claims sounds suspiciously like him: 'It's this eerie moment where you feel like you're listening to yourself'

NotebookLM, Google's notetaking tool, has an AI-generated voice feature that is surprisingly close to a real voice. One radio host argues it's not just close, but an actual ripoff of their voice, and has taken that claim to court. Former NPR radio host David Greene filed his case in California on January 23, and his lawyer argues, "This case arises from Google's deliberate acts of theft. Google used Mr. Greene's voice without authorization and then used those stolen copies to develop, train, and refine its AI broadcasting product, NotebookLM." According to The Washington Post, Green said, "I was, like, completely freaked out... It's this eerie moment where you feel like you're listening to yourself." Citing Greene's work with NPR shows, but also political radio show Left, Right & Center, the filing argues "Google sought to replicate Mr. Greene's distinctive voice -- a voice made iconic over decades of decorated radio and public commentary -- to create synthetic audio products that mimic his delivery, cadence, and persona." David Green's voice. It argues that podcast and radio hosts are typically paid for the use of their voices, as it adds credence and legitimacy to shows, which Google can effectively bypass with a similar voice. This is something I noticed with the tool back in 2024. The podcast hosts confidently announce the facts, which is fair and probably good when they're actually facts. However, the fact that you can plug in any source you like means it can add that confidence to pretty much any idea or theory. Greene's representative argues "Failure to pay the negotiated and agreed-upon price for such professional services, is a violation of multiple statutes and common law", and that "Defendant Google is attempting to disrupt the podcast industry." The case itself compares a clip of David Greene talking about Trump's Big Beautiful Bill to an AI-generated summary of Greene's analysis (alongside a few others). You can listen to those clips below to see for yourself how similar they might be. An excerpt from David Greene's coverage of the Big Beautiful Bill NotebookLM's analysis of David Greene's clip Notably, there doesn't appear to be firm proof that Greene's voice was used in Google's training data. Greene's team notes "an independent forensic software company specializing in voice recognition" analysed the two voices, and "the tests indicated a confidence rating of 53-60% (on a -100% to 100% scale) that Mr. Greene's voice was used to train the software driving NotebookLM." In conversation with The Washington Post, Adam Eisgrau, the Chamber of Progress's Senior Director of AI, Creativity and Copyright Policy, says, "If a California jury finds that the voice of NotebookLM is fully Mr. Greene's, he may win. If they find that it's got attributes he also possesses, but is fundamentally an archetypal anchorperson's tone and delivery it learned from a large dataset, he may not." Google has responded to this suit to the Washington Post, calling the allegations "baseless". José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson, said "the sound of the male voice in NotebookLM's Audio Overviews is based on a paid professional actor Google hired." This mimics a similar case from 2024, where Scarlett Johansson noticed GPT-4o's "her" voice was "eerily similar" to her own. OpenAI soon paused the use of the voice, but it looked particularly strange, as Johansson argues OpenAI previously approached her to add her likeness, which she declined. As Green's case was only recently filed, and we don't have any proof that Greene's voice is in the data set, we don't yet have an indication of how it will go. Either a win or a loss will play into a larger precedent over which data AI companies can and can't use, and how different the output needs to be as a response.

He spent decades perfecting his voice. Now he says Google stole it.

David Greene had never heard of NotebookLM, Google's buzzy artificial intelligence tool that spins up podcasts on demand, until a former colleague emailed him to ask if he'd lent it his voice. "So ... I'm probably the 148th person to ask this, but did you license your voice to Google?" the former co-worker asked in a fall 2024 email. "It sounds very much like you!" Greene, a public radio veteran who has hosted NPR's "Morning Edition" and KCRW's political podcast "Left, Right & Center," looked up the tool, listening to the two virtual co-hosts - one male and one female - engage in light banter. "I was, like, completely freaked out," Greene said. "It's this eerie moment where you feel like you're listening to yourself." Greene felt the male voice sounded just like him - from the cadence and intonation to the occasional "uhhs" and "likes" that Greene had worked over the years to minimize but never eliminated. He said he played it for his wife and her eyes popped. As emails and texts rolled in from friends, family members and co-workers, asking if the AI podcast voice was his, Greene became convinced he'd been ripped off. Now he's suing Google, alleging that it violated his rights by building a product that replicated his voice without payment or permission, giving users the power to make it say things Greene would never say. Google told The Washington Post in a statement on Thursday that NotebookLM's male podcast voice has nothing to do with Greene. Now a Santa Clara County, California, court may be asked to determine whether the resemblance is uncanny enough that ordinary people hearing the voice would assume it's his - and if so, what to do about it. The case is the latest to pit the rights of individual human creators against those of a booming AI industry that promises to transform the economy by allowing people to generate uncannily lifelike speech, prose, images and videos on demand. Behind the artificial voices in NotebookLM and similar tools are language models trained on vast libraries of writing and speech by real humans who were never told their words and voices would be used in that way - raising profound questions of copyright and ownership. From political "voicefakes" to OpenAI touting a female voice for ChatGPT that resembled that of actress Scarlett Johansson, to deepfake scam ads that had a virtual Taylor Swift hawking Le Creuset cookware, the issues raised by Greene's lawsuit are "going to come up a lot," said James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University. A key question for the courts to decide, Grimmelmann said, will be just how closely an AI voice or likeness has to resemble the genuine article in order to count as infringing. Another will be whether Greene's voice is famous enough for ordinary people to recognize it when they listen to NotebookLM and whether he's harmed by the resemblance. Those can be thorny questions when it comes to AI voices. There are software tools that can compare people's voices, but they're more commonly used to find or rule out an exact match between the voices of real humans, rather than a synthetic one. To Greene, the resemblance of the AI voice to his own is uncanny - and the harm is deeper and more personal than just a missed chance to capitalize on his most recognizable asset. "My voice is, like, the most important part of who I am," Greene said. "These allegations are baseless," Google spokesperson José Castañeda said. "The sound of the male voice in NotebookLM's Audio Overviews is based on a paid professional actor Google hired." Greene's lawyer argues the recordings make the resemblance clear. "We have faith in the court and encourage people to listen to the example audio themselves," said Joshua Michelangelo Stein, a partner at the firm Boies Schiller Flexner, which is also representing book authors in a high-profile AI copyright lawsuit against Meta. NotebookLM's "Audio Overviews" feature made a splash on its 2024 release with AI enthusiasts who shared examples of using it to summarize long documents, replacing dozens of pages of text with a breezy podcast that highlighted the main points. While Google hasn't disclosed how many people use the tool, it emerged as a sleeper hit for the search giant in its race with rivals such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI to capture consumers' imagination. In December 2024, the streaming music leader Spotify used the tool as part of its signature "Spotify Wrapped" feature, offering each user a personalized podcast about their listening habits. Online, users have ventured numerous guesses as to who the AI podcasters' voices most resemble. Several have named Greene, but others have mentioned former tech podcaster Leo Laporte or the comedy podcast "Armchair Expert" co-hosted by Dax Shepard and Monica Padman. As a kid growing up in Pittsburgh, Greene idolized Lanny Frattare, the longtime voice of the city's professional baseball team. "I would sit at Pittsburgh Pirates games and act like I was the play-by-play announcer," he recalled. By high school, he and two friends were doing his school's morning announcements, which they turned into a sort of radio show. He wrote a college application essay about his dream of one day becoming a public radio host - an essay his mom dug up and sent to him when he landed his first job at NPR in 2005. There, Greene was mentored by Don Gonyea, NPR's longtime national political correspondent. He learned tricks of the trade, like pretending he was addressing a friend in the room, rather than a distant mass audience, so that his voice would sound conversational rather than "broadcastery." Feedback from listeners and interview subjects told Greene his warm baritone had the power to soothe and convey trust and empathy. On "Morning Edition," his was the voice that some 13 million listeners woke up to from 2012 to 2020, according to NPR, making it the most popular news radio show in America. On "Left, Right & Center," he plays the moderate seeking common ground between pundits from the left and right. "I truly believe that conversations have the power to change our lives and change the world," Greene said. "One of the reasons we're in such a polarized environment right now is because people are forgetting the power of talking to one another." That's what makes the feeling that Google has appropriated his voice and turned it into a robot so galling to Greene. "I read an article in the Guardian about how this podcast tool can be used to spread conspiracy theories and lend credibility to the nastier stuff in our society," he said. "For something that sounds like me to be used in service of that was really troubling." Greene's lawsuit, filed last month in Santa Clara County Superior Court, alleges but does not offer proof that Google trained NotebookLM on his voice. The complaint cites an unnamed AI forensic firm that used its software to compare the artificial voice to Greene's. The tool gave a confidence rating of 53 percent to 60 percent that Greene's voice was used to train the model, which it considers "relatively high" confidence for a comparison between a real person's voice and an artificial one. (A confidence score above zero means the voices are similar, while one below zero indicates they're probably different.) 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. Mike Pesca, host of "The Gist" podcast and a former colleague of Greene's at NPR, said he has an ear for voices and a hobby of trying to identify the actors and celebrities behind voice-overs in TV commercials. The first time he heard NotebookLM, Pesca said, "I was immediately like, 'That's David Greene.'" Pesca said he first assumed that Google had intentionally trained the tool on Greene's voice and that Greene had been compensated. "If I was David Greene I would be upset, not just because they stole my voice," Pesca said, but because they used it to make the podcasting equivalent of AI "slop," a term for spammy, commodified content. "They have banter, but it's very surface-level, un-insightful banter, and they're always saying, 'Yeah, that's so interesting.' It's really bad, because what do we as show hosts have except our taste in commentary and pointing our audience to that which is interesting?" Greene is not the first audio professional to complain that his voice was stolen. Numerous voice actors have been dismayed to hear voices that sound like them in various AI tools. But they face uphill battles in court, in part because they are generally not famous figures, even if their voices are familiar, and because many voice actor contracts license their voices for a wide range of uses. Bills introduced in several states and in Congress have sought to regulate the use of people's voices in AI tools. Greene, however, is relying on long-standing state laws that give public figures certain rights to control how their own likenesses are monetized. Adam Eisgrau, who directs AI copyright policy for the center-left tech trade group Chamber of Progress, said he thinks those laws are sufficient to address cases like Greene's without passing new AI laws at the national level. "If a California jury finds that the voice of NotebookLM is fully Mr. Greene's, he may win," Eisgrau said via email. "If they find that it's got attributes he also possesses, but is fundamentally an archetypal anchorperson's tone and delivery it learned from a large dataset, he may not." Greene said he isn't lobbying for new laws that would risk chilling innovation. He just thinks Google should have asked his permission before releasing a product based on a voice that he believes is essentially his. "I'm not some crazy anti-AI activist," he said. "It's just been a very weird experience."

Creators Are Fighting Back as AI Mimics Their Voices -- This Case Could Set the Rules

As part of Google's Audio Overviews, NotebookLM users can prompt the AI to produce podcast episodes from documents they upload. Greene, who has hosted NPR's Morning Edition and KCRW's Left, Right & Center, has accused Google of basing one of the cohost's voices off of his own without gaining permission or offering compensation. "Without his consent, Google sought to replicate Mr. Greene's distinctive voice -- a voice made iconic over decades of decorated radio and public commentary -- to create synthetic audio products that mimic his delivery, cadence, and persona," read the complaint, according to Gizmodo. The Lawsuit Greene first heard the podcast when a former colleague asked if he had licensed his voice to Google.

Longtime NPR host accuses Google of stealing his voice for AI podcast...

A longtime NPR radio host is suing Google for allegedly stealing his voice for the male podcaster voice in its AI podcast tool, according to a suit filed in Santa Clara County, Calif. David Greene - the former host of "Morning Edition" and "Up First," and current voice of KCRW's "Left, Right & Center" - said he first heard of NotebookLM, Google's AI tool that churns out automated podcasts on demand, when a former colleague emailed him. "So...I'm probably the 148th person to ask this, but did you license your voice to Google?" Greene's former co-worker wrote in an email in fall 2024, after the tool's launch. "It sounds very much like you!" According to the lawsuit, Greene's inboxes were soon flooded with messages from family, friends and colleagues asking whether Greene had struck a deal with Google to use his voice to train its podcast tool - which has a male podcaster voice and a female one that converse. "I was, like, completely freaked out," Greene told the Washington Post. "It's this eerie moment where you feel like you're listening to yourself." "I'm not some crazy anti-AI activist. It's just been a very weird experience." Google, which launched its automated podcast tool in 2024, denied the claims in the lawsuit, which was filed Jan. 23. "These allegations are baseless. The sound of the male voice in NotebookLM's Audio Overviews is based on a paid professional actor Google hired," Google spokesperson José Castañeda told The Post. Greene - who landed his first job at NPR in 2005 - said the male podcast voice on NotebookLM sounded just like him, with the same cadence and intonation and occasional "uhs" and "likes." "My voice is, like, the most important part of who I am," Greene told the Washington Post, adding that his wife's eyes popped when he played the AI podcast for her. His lawsuit alleges but does not offer proof that Google spoofed his voice for its AI-powered podcast generator. The complaint cites an unnamed AI forensic firm that used its software to analyze audio from NotebookLM - giving it a 53% to 60% rating that Greene's voice was used to train the bot. This is a "relatively high" confidence rating, according to the lawsuit. Greene's lawsuit is just the latest to question a major tech firm over possible copyright infringement in its training of AI tools. Scarlett Johansson threatened legal action against OpenAI in 2024, when it released a "Sky" chatbot voice that sounded similar to the famous actress - after she turned down an offer from the company to voice one of its upcoming bots. OpenAI ultimately wiped Sky from its platform. Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, faced backlash in 2024 after sexually explicit "deepfake" images of Taylor Swift were viewed millions of times on the app. The platform temporarily removed the singer's name and related terms from its search bar - though one of the AI-generated images had already been viewed 47 million times before it was taken down. Greene's lawyer - Joshua Michelangelo Stein, a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner - is also representing book authors including comedian Sarah Silverman and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates in their AI copyright lawsuit against Meta. "We have faith in the court and encourage people to listen to the example audio themselves," Stein told the Washington Post. Stein did not immediately respond to The Post's request for comment.