Description: NPR's David Greene reportedly sued Google LLC and Alphabet in Santa Clara County, alleging NotebookLM's Audio Overviews uses a synthetic male voice that purportedly mimics his cadence and delivery without consent or compensation. The complaint reportedly cited an independent voice-recognition analysis reporting 53–60% confidence his voice trained the model. Google reportedly called the allegations baseless and said the voice is based on a paid actor.
Editor Notes: Copy of the filed lawsuit: https://business.cch.com/ipld/GreeneGoogleAlphabetComplaint20260123.pdf.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Google and NotebookLM developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Voice Actors and David Greene.
Alleged implicated AI system: NotebookLM
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1386
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2026-01-23
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
Loading...
David Greene had never heard of NotebookLM, Google's buzzy artificial intelligence tool that spins up podcasts on demand, until a former colleague emailed him to ask if he'd lent it his voice.
"So... I'm probably the 148th person to ask thi…
Variants
A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
Seen something similar?
