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 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 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.