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Radio host David Greene says Google's NotebookLM tool stole his voice
https://archive.ph/p81wc https://archive.ph/p81wc
- j-bos 8mo agoAt 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.
- kelseyfrog 8mo agoCan we not sample indefinitely from the latent space of vocal and delivery characteristics?
- parpfish 8mo agothe "latent space containing all voices" may give you the ability to parametrize voices and make an infinite number of unique voices. BUT... people have a limited ability to distinguish points in that space. in perceptual psychology/psychophysics, there's the concept of the "just-noticeable difference" (JND) which is the smallest change to a stimulus you can make that is reliable detectable. normally the JND is measured on physical properties like brightness, pitch, etc but there's no reason it couldn't be applied to a more abstract latent space. two points in a particular latent space may be mathematically unique, but if they're indistinguishable to humans we shouldn't treat them as distinct voices
- altcunn 8mo ago[dead]
- b00ty4breakfast 8mo agoAren't these models are trained publicly available data? this might hold for some rando you doesn't have their likeness in many places to be gobbled up by the Datamongers but these programs imitating someone who has been in the media for 20 years like David Greene is not the result of chance unless you are being excessively charitable. Even if it is complete chance, there's no way to peer inside and confirm that because these things are completely opaque black boxes
- lysace 8mo agoEchoes of when Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of stealing her voice. That time it was impossible to tell who was in the right - there was no available recording of OpenAI's supposed Scarlett clone - they had pulled it immediately for fear of bad PR. Then came the completely nonsensical HN threads with people arguing about something they hadn't heard. Maybe don't redo that whole thing? Could we at least make sure to secure some examples of A and B, this time? -- Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice (May 20, 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40421225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40421225 (1021 comments) OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show (May 23, 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40448045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40448045 (1218 comments)
- ghostly_s 8mo agoDon't know what you're talking about, clips of the AI voice were publicly available at the time.
- lysace 8mo agoThey were definitely not. Here is someone in that first thread trying to figure out what is actually going on, and failing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40421757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40421757 I had to wade through 12 gigantic generic political subthreads to find this. "Do you have an example of the changed voice anywhere?" (No replies.) "Yes, I feel gaslit by the whole situation" is a great summary. Please post a clip from the time. I'm still curious to hear how similar or not they acually were.
- Leynos 8mo agohttps://x.com/OpenAI/status/1790072174117613963?s=20 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1790072174117613963?s=20
- lysace 8mo agoThat's not it. This is the first version of the Sky voice model which most people seem to agree doesn't sound that much like Scarlett. See my adjacent comment for more details.
- dpe82 8mo agoAlso available on msn.com sans paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/he-spent-decades-perfecting-his-voice-now-he-says-google-stole-it/ar-AA1Wo84O https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/he-spent-decades-perfectin...
- ghostly_s 8mo agoThanks, but the audio clips don't work here either.
- johnwheeler 8mo agoHis 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.
- reaperducer 8mo agoHis voice doesn't sound that distinctive to me. It doesn't matter whether it sounds distinctive to you. What matters is whether it's close enough to the real person's voice to be an infringement. Just like it doesn't matter if you used a machine to duplicate a painting. It's still an infringement. You can't publish a Harry Potter novel and then throw up your hands and say, "It wasn't me. The AI decided to name the characters Hargid and Hermione and Snape." Google says it paid a voice actor. If it provides proof of that, good. But like with a lot of AI things, we're in new territory here. Seems like there's a market for a tool that can compare an AI voice to a library of known famous voices so that companies like Google can tweak their machines to not sound too much like someone who can be harmed by a sound-alike.
- nerdsniper 8mo ago> What matters is whether it's close enough to the real person's voice to be an infringement. Also not sufficient. There has to be some evidence they attempted to copy the voice rather than just found one that was eerily similar. This comes up from time to time without AI either. Like its not good if a firm goes out to find someone with a voice similar to a famous person / voice actor…but its fine if they just randomly find one that sounds exactly the same and they say “oooh lets go with this one” and not “oooh perfect this sounds just like Dan LaFontaine!”
- dehrmann 8mo agoAll sorts of movie trailers used Don LaFontaine knockoffs.
- fhub 8mo agoHe'll likely file in California or Federal and ask for Jury trial. I think a Jury will be sympathetic. I doubt Google will want this to go to a jury trial - not worth the risk, further news cycles of negative PR and impact on staff morale. NPR is credible and liked.
- barbazoo 8mo ago> Greene felt the male voice sounded just like him Turns out he still has his own voice, that one sounds like him.
- 13415 8mo agoThat's likely the case because they deliberately cloned his voice.
- IshKebab 8mo agoUnlikely. Most likely is that they used a lot of his podcasts in training and the AI picked a voice that was well represented in its training set because that's how it works. Nobody at Google was like "we should use this guy's voice!"
- golfer 8mo agoIf you read the article, Google says they hired a professional voice actor to create the NotebookLM voice. I'm sure this will come to light in the lawsuit.
- 9x39 8mo agoDoesn't seem like a very good clone. I wonder if he's hoping he's in their training data for a payout, if he can force that to be disclosed. I think a few random samples trivially shows NotebookLM is higher pitched, although if you generalize to "deep male voice with vocal fry" you could lump them together with half the radio and podcast voices.
- anigbrowl 8mo agoI've been a pro sound engineer for 30 years, doing music, film, and producing podcasts for other people, plus I have years of prior training in elocution, which requires knowing about the anatomy and articulation dynamics of the human voice. The voices don't sound that similar to me, and he has what I think of as a generic mid-atlantic accent. I'm sure it feels uncomfortably similar to him, but I think this is a mix of confirmation bias and the fact that radio and tv stations have long selected for 'average' sounding voices because listeners and viewers will call in to complain about voices they find annoying. Performers in this field cultivate those kind of generic voices, much as real estate agents cultivate aim for a friendly-but-bland look rather than trying to stand out individually. I do feel for the guy a bit because voice generation is now so good that there's no reason to pay performers with a 'radio voice' for commercial voice-over or narration work in many cases, and I question the value of applying AI to fields of personal rather than industrial endeavor - was the cost of human vocalization such a drain on the economy that we are better off for automating those jobs away as quickly as possible? However, I don't buy his claim that his individual voice and way of speaking was stolen. It's just not very distinctive to me, in the same way that faces from thispersondoesnotexist.com will inevitably approximate the appearance of some real people.
- prodigycorp 8mo agoI always thought the female voice sounded eerily similar to Tracy Alloway.
- teekert 8mo agoI 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 https://podverse.fm/clip/Vy4y7ZG2Rd [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=NotebookLM%20Copied%20a%20Podcaster%27s%20Voice&type=story&dateRange=all&sort=byDate&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=NotebookLM%20Copied%20a%20Podc...
- oniony 8mo agoWhere no limbs are left behind.
- walthamstow 8mo agoI think I rememeber an episode where he played a clip of AI Chris talking about Linux at the start of an episode and I genuinely couldn't tell the difference
- teekert 8mo ago
- tantalor 8mo agoCompare for yourself. David Greene: https://youtu.be/xYxQrLp4MQk https://youtu.be/xYxQrLp4MQk NotebookLM: https://youtu.be/AR4dRtzFvxM https://youtu.be/AR4dRtzFvxM I think he just has "podcast guy" voice. It's pretty generic.
- koolba 8mo agoThe more familiar you are with his voice the less similar it would sound. It’s like how siblings look more similar to strangers.
- hinkley 8mo agoWell remember that how your voice sounds to you isn’t what other people hear. But I’m the guy who blurts out how the voice actor for the gate guard played the brother in that movie with that guy. And I can hear what he’s complaining about. There’s a lot of elements of his voice and the tempo is pretty close. )usually it’s the tempo and certain phonemes that give people away to me when they are doing a different accent)
- Zigurd 8mo agoWhen I tried NotebookLM on a long project management training deck, I thought the male voice sounded quite a bit like Leo Laporte. The format and banter seemed similar, too.
- kylecazar 8mo agoWow, I haven't heard that name in a long while. Brought me back to watching he and Kevin Rose on TV after school.
- dgeiser13 8mo agoThe NotebookLM voice sounds more like Kai Ryssdal to me.
- hinkley 8mo agoI hear this one. I tend to catch patterns in tempo as much or more so as timbre and this is awfully close on both accounts. I don’t hear the Chris Fisher comparison that was also posted. So I would say that where there is smoke there is sometimes fire at this point.
- bethekidyouwant 8mo agoIf someone is born with David Attenborough‘s exact voice… what happens?
- recursive 8mo agoNo problem. But if they train intensively to achieve that and compete with David, maybe problem? IANAL
- neural_thing 8mo agoPeople are REALLY bad at distinguishing voices. For every AI voice, there are tons of people claiming it's theirs. Well known problem for TTS.
- bamboozled 8mo agoNo they aren't.
- Unearned5161 8mo agoPeople are bad at distinguishing strange voices in a lineup, yes. That is, anyone in this thread who hasn't heard much of either the NotebookLM or Greene's voice would be a terrible witness. However, the equation changes considerably when the voice becomes familiar. You can imagine it like going from CPU to an ASIC. The brain is rather good at telling when a voice is your friend or not, the evolutionary pressure should be clear. Therefore, the people most qualified to speak on this matter will be first and foremost Greene and his podcast fans. It's a matter of exposure.
- ukuina 8mo agoIt sounds closer to Leo Laporte from TWiT.
- Unearned5161 8mo agoThere 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.
- qingcharles 8mo agoI 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.
- maximalthinker 8mo ago[dead]