Public radio host sues Google for using his voice in NotebookLM without permission



David Greene , a radio personality who works for the American public radio station NPR , has sued Google, the developer of NotebookLM , claiming that his voice was stolen by the app.

Radio host David Greene says Google's AI podcast tool stole his voice - The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/15/david-greene-google-ai-podcast/

Longtime NPR host David Greene sues Google over NotebookLM voice | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/15/longtime-npr-host-david-greene-sues-google-over-notebooklm-voice/

Google's NotebookLM is an AI research assistant tool powered by Gemini, Google's generative AI. Users can upload source texts, websites, videos, etc., and the tool can then summarise, translate, and create exercises based on them. It also has an audio summary feature, which allows users to summarise input information in a conversational, podcast-like format.

How to quickly summarize long YouTube videos with Google's free AI notebook 'NotebookLM' to make them understandable in a short time & how to generate audio podcasts that you can listen to while doing other things - GIGAZINE



In the fall of 2024, Greene received a call from a former colleague asking, 'Did you license your voice to Google?' He noticed that NotebookLM was using a voice that sounded very similar to his own.

Regarding his first impression of NotebookLM's voice, Green said, 'It was absolutely terrifying. It was an eerie moment, like hearing my own voice.' The voice perfectly mimicked Green, down to his inflection, intonation, and occasional murmured responses like 'eh' and 'good.' 'My wife's eyes were wide when she heard it,' Green said.

After receiving similar messages from family, friends, and colleagues, Green decided to sue Google.

Greene claims that by copying her voice without her permission, Google has violated her rights by empowering users to say things she would never say.



In response to Greene's complaint, Google told The Washington Post, 'The male voice used in the NotebookLM podcast is in no way related to Greene.' 'The male voice used in the NotebookLM audio summary was performed by a professional actor hired by Google.'

A court in Santa Clara County, California, may be asked to decide whether the audio is similar enough that a layperson would recognize it as Green just by listening to it, and if so, how to proceed.

The Washington Post reported, 'The lawsuit is the latest to pit the rights of individual human creators against the rights of a burgeoning AI industry that promises to transform the economy by enabling the on-demand generation of stunningly lifelike speech, prose, images, and video. Behind the artificial voices found in tools like NotebookLM are language models trained on vast libraries of real-life human text and speech. The humans used to train these models are unaware that their words and voices will be used by AI, raising serious questions about copyright and ownership.'

This isn't the first time that AI voices have come under fire for sounding similar to real people. Actor Scarlett Johansson sued OpenAI, claiming that OpenAI's GPT-4o voice sounded similar to her own. OpenAI subsequently removed the voice in question.

Scarlett Johansson expresses shock and anger over GPT-4o's new voice sounding similar to her own



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in AI, Posted by logu_ii