Compare for yourself.

David Greene: https://youtu.be/xYxQrLp4MQk

NotebookLM: https://youtu.be/AR4dRtzFvxM

I think he just has "podcast guy" voice. It's pretty generic.

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.

It doesn't matter if the voice is a perfect facsimile — it only matters whether a court can be persuaded that the result is derivative.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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