Yup, it's absolutely not his voice. The NotebookLM voice is pitched significantly higher.

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.

Yeah, this shouldn’t even be on HN, or Washington Post for that matter.

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.

Congratulations. I hate both of them. Maybe I’m old but the podcast style of “there might be some interesting information here, but let me tease it for ages with a voice that makes you think something interesting is about to happen…” No sir, I don’t like it

I've listened to tens of hours of NotebookLM, and this doesn't even seem close. If someone had played his voice for me and asked if it sounded like any LLM/bot I was aware of, I would have said no. It would not have even occurred to me that they were thinking of NotebookLM.

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.

It sounds similar, but doesn't sound the same to me. Also how would you determine the similarity allowed? Maybe if we would have such a measure they could use that in voice model training to not allow that much similarity to a single voice, but if we don't have an agreed upon value for that than it's a subjective "sounds the same to me" rule then it's hard to follow that. Ok, they can say that don't train on their voice, but it's very likely that a blend of voices from an "allowed" set could produce a very similar voice to his.

I hear this one. I tend to catch patterns in tempo as much or more so as timbre and this is awfully close on both accounts. I don’t hear the Chris Fisher comparison that was also posted.

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

It's like they tried their hardest to add as much vocal fry [1] as possible.

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

The more familiar you are with his voice the less similar it would sound. It’s like how siblings look more similar to strangers.

The NotebookLM voice sounds more like Kai Ryssdal to me.

When I tried NotebookLM on a long project management training deck, I thought the male voice sounded quite a bit like Leo Laporte. The format and banter seemed similar, too.

Dude voice, totally. I can’t describe it other than dude voice.

Probably an unpopular opinion on this forum where everyone is considering can something be done vs should something be done, but it sounds like theft to me.

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.

Yeah, I don't hear it.

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.

I think I rememeber an episode where he played a clip of AI Chris talking about Linux at the start of an episode and I genuinely couldn't tell the difference

In the clip, I thought he was playing a prank by reading the script of NotebookLM as the third voice (after the woman). Was that really NotebookLM? I've only heard the first two voices and the first voice didn't sound like him to me, but the last one definitely sounded like him.

I don’t agree with this one, which puts me at one yes and one no.

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.

Where no limbs are left behind.

Thanks, but the audio clips don't work here either.

Aren't these models are trained publicly available data? this might hold for some rando you doesn't have their likeness in many places to be gobbled up by the Datamongers but these programs imitating someone who has been in the media for 20 years like David Greene is not the result of chance unless you are being excessively charitable.

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

Can we not sample indefinitely from the latent space of vocal and delivery characteristics?

That's likely the case because they deliberately cloned his voice.

I think a lot of sport announcers sound the same. There might just be classes of voices where you expect a faceless voice in some scenario to sound a certain way.

He'll likely file in California or Federal and ask for Jury trial. I think a Jury will be sympathetic. I doubt Google will want this to go to a jury trial - not worth the risk, further news cycles of negative PR and impact on staff morale. NPR is credible and liked.

His voice doesn't sound that distinctive to me.

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.

No problem. But if they train intensively to achieve that and compete with David, maybe problem? IANAL

https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1790072174117613963?s=20

Don't know what you're talking about, clips of the AI voice were publicly available at the time.