A California judge has issued a tentative ruling overruling Google’s demurrer to claims by David Greene, the former host of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” that Google’s AI-powered podcast-like tool copied his voice.
(A demurrer is a pleading under California law that challenges the legal sufficiency of a complaint, arguing that the opposing party has failed to state a valid claim even if all factual allegations in the complaint are assumed to be true.)
Greene spent eight years on “Morning Edition” and now hosts podcasts.
Google claimed that it hired a professional actor to provide the voice for its tool, rather than copying Greene.
NotebookLM was a Google tool that turns documents into two-“host” audio summaries – similar to podcasts.
Greene said that in the fall of 2024 he starting getting emails and texts from friends and colleagues who thought they recognized his voice in the Google tool.
As the Washington Post reported, a former colleague emailed him to ask if he’d licensed his voice to Google.
Greene listened to the Google tool, and, as the Post reported,
Greene felt that the male voice sounded just like him — from the cadence and intonation to the occasional “uhh” or “like” that Greene had worked over the years to minimize but never eliminated. He said he played it for his wife and her eyes popped.
In his complaint, he cited a report by an AI forensic firm that compared the Google tool’s male voice with recordings of Greene. The report concluded with a confidence level of 53-60 percent that Greene’s voice was used to train the tool.
The Post noted that,
From political “voicefakes” to OpenAI touting a female voice for ChatGPT that resembled that of actress Scarlett Johansson, to deepfake scam ads that had a virtual Taylor Swift hawking Le Creuset cookware, the issues raised by Greene’s lawsuit are “going to come up a lot”…
The Post article quoted James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University:
A key question for the courts to decide, Grimmelmann said, will be just how closely an AI voice or likeness has to resemble the genuine article to count as infringing. Another will be whether Greene’s voice is famous enough for ordinary people to recognize it when they listen to NotebookLM and whether he’s harmed by the resemblance.
As Voice Over Herald comments,
Here’s the part working voice actors should sit up for. Nobody in this case says Greene’s recordings were simply copied and pasted. Google says it paid a real performer. Greene says the result still takes his identity. If a court ends up agreeing with him, then a hired, consenting, properly paid voice can still land a company in trouble when it sounds too much like a famous one.
The Herald also mentioned a 1988 case in which a federal appeals court sided with Bette Middler after Ford used an impersonator singing a Midler song in one of its commercials.
Ford’s ad campaign for the Mercury Sable was meant to inspire nostalgia by using famous songs from the 1970s sung by their original artists. Although the owner of the song’s copyright gave permission to Ford, Middler refused to license her performance of it.
The court ruled that the voice of someone famous as a singer is distinctive to their person and image and therefore, as a part of their identity, it’s unlawful to imitate their voice without their express consent and approval.
In the tentative ruling, the judge stated that “Every cause of action also states a claim based on appropriation of Greene’s voice and identity.”
Just like the haiku above, we like to keep our posts short and sweet. Hopefully, you found this bite-sized information helpful. If you would like more information, please do not hesitate to contact us here: https://aeonlaw.com/contact-us/.
