NPR "Morning Edition" host, David Greene, filed a lawsuit against Google in a Santa Clara County court, claiming that the company"s viral NotebookLM AI tool uses a voice that is a dead ringer for his own without his consent.
Greene"s lawsuit reportedly came after several people, including a former coworker who emailed him in the fall of 2024, came up to him to ask if he had licensed his voice for the new male podcast voice.
His friends mentioned that the AI host "sounds very much" like him, capturing the specific cadence and verbal habits he has developed over a long career. When he finally listened to the audio, he described the experience as eerie because the digital clone mimicked his tone so closely that the resemblance startled his own wife.
NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant that Google built to help people organize notes and summarize complex documents. It has this AI podcast feature that generates a back-and-forth conversation between two AI hosts, a man and a woman, who banter and break down whatever data you upload.
Greene says he is not "some crazy anti-AI activist". He just has a problem with Google allegedly scraping his life"s work without taking permission or any form of compensation. He worries that users could use the tool to make his voice say things he would never say, especially since he considers his vocal delivery the "most important part" of who he is.
In a statement to the Washington Post, Google"s spokesperson, José Castañeda, called the allegations "baseless" and insisted the company did nothing wrong. The company claims it used a paid professional actor to create the male voice and that the similarities to Greene are just a coincidence.
According to the legal complaint, an AI forensic firm analyzed the voice to see if a match existed. The forensic tool provided a confidence score of 53% to 60% that the model used Greene"s voice during the training process.
Here"s a side-by-side comparison of David Greene"s voice and the AI"s voice:
| David Greene | AI male podcaster in NotebookLM |
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Greene"s case might remind you of the fight between Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI. In that 2024 drama, the actress was approached by the company"s CEO, Sam Altman, who felt her voice would be "comforting" to people using its ChatGPT AI chatbot.
Johansson declined, but the company soon released a new voice called "Sky" that sounded almost exactly like her performance as "Samantha" in the 2013 film Her. After the launch, Johansson, like Greene, was shocked by the similarity and sent a legal complaint demanding that OpenAI explain how the voice was made.
OpenAI first defended its actions, claiming it hired a different professional actress. But following an investigation and public pressure, the company apologized and paused the use of the voice out of respect for the veteran actress.