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
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.
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.
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.
Well remember that how your voice sounds to you isn’t what other people hear.
But I’m the guy who blurts out how the voice actor for the gate guard played the brother in that movie with that guy. And I can hear what he’s complaining about. There’s a lot of elements of his voice and the tempo is pretty close.
)usually it’s the tempo and certain phonemes that give people away to me when they are doing a different accent)
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.
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.
It's not theft, it's copying. Two different words, with two different meanings, and different legality, for very good reason. You can only steal things that can be taken away, which is why theft is bad, because it deprives the original owner of something they once had.
Copying does not directly deprive anyone of anything. In fact it just adds more value to the world, and makes it more available to more people.
Nobody can "copy" stuff and put it behind a paywall, because the original is still free. It's the prevention of copying that leads to expression, art, information, stories, music, and creativity being locked behind paywalls.
It's said that copying disincentivizes creativity and creation, but in practice it does the opposite. See: the incredible amount of music, fiction, software, etc. that have proliferated since the birth of the web.
What copying does do is it indirectly deprives people and companies of the ability monopolize profits on particular expressions without competition. But I'm not so sure that's a bad thing.
For example, look at the software industry. I'm extremely grateful that patents and copyright are so rarely enforced in software and UI design, and that we've all been copying the good ideas that came before us for decades with no consequence. I'm grateful the same is true of food recipes, too. I think the world would likely be a richer one if this was true for most fields and art.
Back in the day there were these Star Wars games. Now obviously Mark Hamill costs money and he wasn't going to come back for anything less than a Disney "offer you can't refuse" pay check.
So they got someone who could fake it pretty well.
Ofcourse fast forward in 2026 an actor automatically sells off their face, voice and soul when they sign a contract in perpuity.
I listen to some Jupiter Broadcasting podcasts. The main host (Chris Fisher) regularly pops up in NotebookLLM content, with his voice. Sometimes it just jumps in, and then after some time out again. It’s usually a pretty perfect imitation, I can’t hear the difference .
Edit, here an older piece, there have been many since: [0], it’s the 3rd voice that enters the NotebookLLM clip so it takes a minute before it comes in (shared this clip here late 2024 [1]).
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.
It’s the voice after the woman indeed. I think it’s very close, didn’t understand what happened the first time I heard it. And this was 2024, they found many funny examples and they get better and are even better copies.
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.
Yeah it’s after the woman enters. That is usually how it happens, suddenly his voice comes in, even though it’s a duo suddenly it’s his voice for some time. And really with all his mannerisms. I guess there is just a lot of his material out there.
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
the "latent space containing all voices" may give you the ability to parametrize voices and make an infinite number of unique voices. BUT... people have a limited ability to distinguish points in that space.
in perceptual psychology/psychophysics, there's the concept of the "just-noticeable difference" (JND) which is the smallest change to a stimulus you can make that is reliable detectable.
normally the JND is measured on physical properties like brightness, pitch, etc but there's no reason it couldn't be applied to a more abstract latent space. two points in a particular latent space may be mathematically unique, but if they're indistinguishable to humans we shouldn't treat them as distinct voices
If you read the article, Google says they hired a professional voice actor to create the NotebookLM voice. I'm sure this will come to light in the lawsuit.
Unlikely. Most likely is that they used a lot of his podcasts in training and the AI picked a voice that was well represented in its training set because that's how it works.
Nobody at Google was like "we should use this guy's voice!"
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.
> 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.
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.
In general, without any context, I doubt there are a lot of people you'd immediately recognize by their voice. When I was podcasting (and editing) there were certainly some people I would recognize but in general not so much.
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.
> What matters is whether it's close enough to the real person's voice to be an infringement.
Also not sufficient. There has to be some evidence they attempted to copy the voice rather than just found one that was eerily similar.
This comes up from time to time without AI either. Like its not good if a firm goes out to find someone with a voice similar to a famous person / voice actor…but its fine if they just randomly find one that sounds exactly the same and they say “oooh lets go with this one” and not “oooh perfect this sounds just like Dan LaFontaine!”
Echoes of when Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of stealing her voice. That time it was impossible to tell who was in the right - there was no available recording of OpenAI's supposed Scarlett clone - they had pulled it immediately for fear of bad PR.
Then came the completely nonsensical HN threads with people arguing about something they hadn't heard.
Maybe don't redo that whole thing? Could we at least make sure to secure some examples of A and B, this time?
--
Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice (May 20, 2024)
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.
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
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.
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.
Probably it's what his voice sounds like to himself. Maybe he should listen to his own podcasts more.
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.
The NotebookLM voice sounds more like Kai Ryssdal to me.
The more familiar you are with his voice the less similar it would sound. It’s like how siblings look more similar to strangers.
Well remember that how your voice sounds to you isn’t what other people hear.
But I’m the guy who blurts out how the voice actor for the gate guard played the brother in that movie with that guy. And I can hear what he’s complaining about. There’s a lot of elements of his voice and the tempo is pretty close.
)usually it’s the tempo and certain phonemes that give people away to me when they are doing a different accent)
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.
Wow, I haven't heard that name in a long while. Brought me back to watching he and Kevin Rose on TV after school.
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.
It's not theft, it's copying. Two different words, with two different meanings, and different legality, for very good reason. You can only steal things that can be taken away, which is why theft is bad, because it deprives the original owner of something they once had.
Copying does not directly deprive anyone of anything. In fact it just adds more value to the world, and makes it more available to more people.
Nobody can "copy" stuff and put it behind a paywall, because the original is still free. It's the prevention of copying that leads to expression, art, information, stories, music, and creativity being locked behind paywalls.
It's said that copying disincentivizes creativity and creation, but in practice it does the opposite. See: the incredible amount of music, fiction, software, etc. that have proliferated since the birth of the web.
What copying does do is it indirectly deprives people and companies of the ability monopolize profits on particular expressions without competition. But I'm not so sure that's a bad thing.
For example, look at the software industry. I'm extremely grateful that patents and copyright are so rarely enforced in software and UI design, and that we've all been copying the good ideas that came before us for decades with no consequence. I'm grateful the same is true of food recipes, too. I think the world would likely be a richer one if this was true for most fields and art.
Back in the day there were these Star Wars games. Now obviously Mark Hamill costs money and he wasn't going to come back for anything less than a Disney "offer you can't refuse" pay check.
So they got someone who could fake it pretty well.
Ofcourse fast forward in 2026 an actor automatically sells off their face, voice and soul when they sign a contract in perpuity.
I listen to some Jupiter Broadcasting podcasts. The main host (Chris Fisher) regularly pops up in NotebookLLM content, with his voice. Sometimes it just jumps in, and then after some time out again. It’s usually a pretty perfect imitation, I can’t hear the difference .
Edit, here an older piece, there have been many since: [0], it’s the 3rd voice that enters the NotebookLLM clip so it takes a minute before it comes in (shared this clip here late 2024 [1]).
[0] https://podverse.fm/clip/Vy4y7ZG2Rd
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=NotebookLM%20Copied%20a%20Podc...
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.
And presumably anyone who has had vocal coaching for speech is going to sound somewhat similar to whatever is considered "normal" for where they live.
It’s the voice after the woman indeed. I think it’s very close, didn’t understand what happened the first time I heard it. And this was 2024, they found many funny examples and they get better and are even better copies.
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
Yeah for sure it has copied his voice and mannerisms nearly perfectly.
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.
Yeah it’s after the woman enters. That is usually how it happens, suddenly his voice comes in, even though it’s a duo suddenly it’s his voice for some time. And really with all his mannerisms. I guess there is just a lot of his material out there.
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.
At a certain point with generative AI we're going to run out of voices and faces the same way we run out of domain names and trademarks.
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?
the "latent space containing all voices" may give you the ability to parametrize voices and make an infinite number of unique voices. BUT... people have a limited ability to distinguish points in that space.
in perceptual psychology/psychophysics, there's the concept of the "just-noticeable difference" (JND) which is the smallest change to a stimulus you can make that is reliable detectable.
normally the JND is measured on physical properties like brightness, pitch, etc but there's no reason it couldn't be applied to a more abstract latent space. two points in a particular latent space may be mathematically unique, but if they're indistinguishable to humans we shouldn't treat them as distinct voices
I always thought the female voice sounded eerily similar to Tracy Alloway.
Also available on msn.com sans paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/he-spent-decades-perfectin...
Thanks, but the audio clips don't work here either.
> Greene felt the male voice sounded just like him
Turns out he still has his own voice, that one sounds like him.
That's likely the case because they deliberately cloned his voice.
If you read the article, Google says they hired a professional voice actor to create the NotebookLM voice. I'm sure this will come to light in the lawsuit.
Unlikely. Most likely is that they used a lot of his podcasts in training and the AI picked a voice that was well represented in its training set because that's how it works.
Nobody at Google was like "we should use this guy's voice!"
His voice doesn't sound that distinctive to me. He's going to have a hard time unless he can find some emails that say, use David Green's voice.
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.
> 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.
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.
In general, without any context, I doubt there are a lot of people you'd immediately recognize by their voice. When I was podcasting (and editing) there were certainly some people I would recognize but in general not so much.
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.
> What matters is whether it's close enough to the real person's voice to be an infringement.
Also not sufficient. There has to be some evidence they attempted to copy the voice rather than just found one that was eerily similar.
This comes up from time to time without AI either. Like its not good if a firm goes out to find someone with a voice similar to a famous person / voice actor…but its fine if they just randomly find one that sounds exactly the same and they say “oooh lets go with this one” and not “oooh perfect this sounds just like Dan LaFontaine!”
All sorts of movie trailers used Don LaFontaine knockoffs.
If someone is born with David Attenborough‘s exact voice… what happens?
Echoes of when Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of stealing her voice. That time it was impossible to tell who was in the right - there was no available recording of OpenAI's supposed Scarlett clone - they had pulled it immediately for fear of bad PR.
Then came the completely nonsensical HN threads with people arguing about something they hadn't heard.
Maybe don't redo that whole thing? Could we at least make sure to secure some examples of A and B, this time?
--
Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice (May 20, 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40421225 (1021 comments)
OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show (May 23, 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40448045 (1218 comments)
https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1790072174117613963?s=20
That's not it. This is the first version of the Sky voice model which most people seem to agree doesn't sound that much like Scarlett.
See my adjacent comment for more details.
Don't know what you're talking about, clips of the AI voice were publicly available at the time.
They were definitely not. Here is someone in that first thread trying to figure out what is actually going on, and failing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40421757
I had to wade through 12 gigantic generic political subthreads to find this.
"Do you have an example of the changed voice anywhere?" (No replies.)
"Yes, I feel gaslit by the whole situation" is a great summary.
Please post a clip from the time. I'm still curious to hear how similar or not they acually were.