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Radio host David Greene says Google's NotebookLM tool stole his voice

175 points by mikhael

by tantalor

17 subcomments

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.

by teekert

5 subcomments

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...

by neural_thing

2 subcomments

People are REALLY bad at distinguishing voices. For every AI voice, there are tons of people claiming it's theirs. Well known problem for TTS.

by johnwheeler

3 subcomments

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.

by prodigycorp

0 subcomment

by lysace

2 subcomments

by Unearned5161

0 subcomment

There seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread around the human mind's processing of voice sounds.
As with most (all?) things we do, exposure is king. This is how we don't die from trying to process infinite dimensional reality. The brain compresses, it prunes. Things seem similar if you don't have much need to distinguish them.
Unless you've listened to hours of either NotebookLM or Greene, you simply won't be able to participate in the distinguishing of these voices with much ability.

by dpe82

1 subcomments

Also available on msn.com sans paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/he-spent-decades-perfectin...

by ukuina

0 subcomment

by bethekidyouwant

1 subcomments

by qingcharles

0 subcomment

I know someone who is one of the top-rated voiceover artists on Fiverr. Their voice appeared on a video recently I heard and it was definitely cloned from them (as it was not a project they would have worked on).
It's so easy to do now. You can just grab your favorite voiceover artist's demo reel and clone it from there. The chances of getting caught are slim, and what is the (poorly paid) artist going to do? Most of them will lack the resources to fund a protracted court case to sue some anonymous users in Tajikistan making AI slop videos en masse.

by j-bos

2 subcomments

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.

by maximalthinker

0 subcomment

by barbazoo

1 subcomments

> Greene felt the male voice sounded just like him
Turns out he still has his own voice, that one sounds like him.