3 ms·

Compare for yourself. David Greene: https://youtu.be/xYxQrLp4MQk https://youtu.be/xYxQrLp4MQk NotebookLM: https://youtu.be/AR4dRtzFvxM https://youtu.be/AR4dRt

Compare 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Well 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 ago
When 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 ago
  Wow, 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 ago
The NotebookLM voice sounds more like Kai Ryssdal to me.
hinkley 8mo ago
I 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.
crazygringo 8mo ago
Yup, it's absolutely not his voice. The NotebookLM voice is pitched significantly higher. Nor does it seem like his voice but changed "just enough" (like in pitch). I agree, he just has a very generic-sounding "podcast guy" voice. And obviously, NotebookLM trained on tons of podcasts and is generating a highly generic, average-sounding voice. Which is why it's pitched higher, since David Greene has a lower than average pitch. This lawsuit is either just to generate buzz to build his personal brand, or maybe he's worried about the competitive threat from AI. But there's no way he's going to win this suit. This isn't like the case with Bette Midler, where Ford intentionally hired someone to mimic her voice.
- sailfast 8mo ago
  You never know, it might be worth a couple hundred grand in settlement money…
- mhuffman 8mo ago
  >Yup, it's absolutely not his voice. However it does seem to copy the the way he "lisps" his S's. I am not sure that is common 'generic-sounding "podcast guy" voice'.
  - hluska 8mo ago
    When I was university, I got heavy into spoken word poetry and making hip hop. Personal Journals by Sage Francis had become a huge part of my life and rather than focus on school like a mature person I thought I’d make my own album. It turns out I have a profound lack of talent, but I got a lot of experience with a microphone. To me that ‘s’ sound reminds me of the sibilance a Shure SM58 picks up without a pop filter. I hear a different side of the same idea on ‘p’ and ‘b’ as well. I had a speech impediment as a youngster and the sound got in my head. Now I hear it on podcasts.
    - Physkal 8mo ago
      Drop us some heat
  - 8mo ago
disposition2 8mo ago
Probably an unpopular opinion on this forum where everyone is considering can something be done vs should something be done, but it sounds like theft to me. But I am also very anti-AI in the artistic space, because if it weren’t for humans freely providing so much artistic content, we wouldn’t have this outcome. And I believe the only end result will be less humans openly sharing knowledge, because some heavily money backed entities will just steal all the art and put it behind a paywall or advertisement. As much as I appreciate the easy search (because actual useful search has become nonexistent since AI) and the ability to ask AI to find some metadata from a large data payload, I also dislike AI, because it has effectively broken the open internet and the willingness for humans to be open to freely sharing knowledge.
- csallen 8mo ago
  It's not theft, it's copying. Two different words, with two different meanings, and different legality, for very good reason. You can only steal things that can be taken away, which is why theft is bad, because it deprives the original owner of something they once had. Copying does not directly deprive anyone of anything. In fact it just adds more value to the world, and makes it more available to more people. Nobody can "copy" stuff and put it behind a paywall, because the original is still free. It's the prevention of copying that leads to expression being locked behind paywalls. It's said that copying disincentivizes creativity and creation, but in practice it does the opposite. Just look at the incredible amount of music, fiction, software, stories, art, and information that have proliferated since the birth of the web. What copying does do is it indirectly deprives people and companies of the ability monopolize profits on particular expressions without competition. But I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. For example, look at the software industry. I'm extremely grateful that patents and copyright are so rarely enforced in software and UI design, and that we've all been copying the good ideas that came before us for decades with no consequence. I'm grateful the same is true of food recipes, too. I think the world would likely be a richer one if this was true for most fields and art.
  - alvah 8mo ago
    That is the best explanation I have seen yet of the difference. I'm definitely stealing it...
apparent 8mo ago
I've listened to tens of hours of NotebookLM, and this doesn't even seem close. If someone had played his voice for me and asked if it sounded like any LLM/bot I was aware of, I would have said no. It would not have even occurred to me that they were thinking of NotebookLM. As @crazygringo said, David's voice is lower. I think it might have some of the same harmonics, but it has some lower ones too, which make the overall sound come across as lower-pitched. I'm not using technical terminology here, so perhaps someone can jump in with the appropriate terms.
- amelius 8mo ago
  Probably it's what his voice sounds like to himself. Maybe he should listen to his own podcasts more.
  - apparent 8mo ago
    I thought about this. IIRC a person's voice sounds deeper in his own head because it reverberates in his skull. if anything, this would make David think the NotebookLM voice sound less like his (since his is already deeper, to begin with). But it's possible that a professional radio host is aware of this effect and adjusts for it when deciding if something sounds like him. Maybe he over-adjusts and thinks this is what he sounds like. As for his wife, it's possible that he speaks in a higher/friendlier register when talking to her/their kids.
    - shermantanktop 8mo ago
      The real question is how high his voice gets when talking to his pets…
tbossanova 8mo ago
Congratulations. I hate both of them. Maybe I’m old but the podcast style of “there might be some interesting information here, but let me tease it for ages with a voice that makes you think something interesting is about to happen…” No sir, I don’t like it
- irishcoffee 8mo ago
  This is the same reason I’ve watched about 4 hours of YouTube since it launched. Almost all car-repair videos.
  - anigbrowl 8mo ago
    I watch a lot of synthesizer videos, and over the years an wholly organic 'no talking' genre has emerged for just this reason. Some people do reviews via subtitles.
spyder 8mo ago
It sounds similar, but doesn't sound the same to me. Also how would you determine the similarity allowed? Maybe if we would have such a measure they could use that in voice model training to not allow that much similarity to a single voice, but if we don't have an agreed upon value for that than it's a subjective "sounds the same to me" rule then it's hard to follow that. Ok, they can say that don't train on their voice, but it's very likely that a blend of voices from an "allowed" set could produce a very similar voice to his.
jader201 8mo ago
Yeah, this shouldn’t even be on HN, or Washington Post for that matter. There are going to be countless people that think AI is using their voice. Humans share remarkably similar voices, but obviously you can’t copy that (other than impersonations, obviously). Unless there is evidence that a company intentionally went after a specific human voice to train their AI, there’s no reason to report on these people claiming AI is using their voice. Maybe if it’s someone with a very distinctive voice. But this guy, as the OP said, just has a “generic podcast guy” voice.
- reactordev 8mo ago
  You absolutely can copy that, it’s called voice cloning and you can do it on as little as a few seconds of audio. Once cloned, you can generate audio with that voice, saying whatever you want it to.
  - jader201 8mo ago
    To be clear, I mean someone can’t file a lawsuit against someone else for sounding like them. Of course you can have an AI target someone else’s voice. My point is that unless there is evidence it was intentional, it’s silly to claim that just because it sounds similar to a human’s voice, that means it must’ve been intentional.
    - reaperducer 8mo ago
      I mean someone can’t file a lawsuit against someone else for sounding like them. But they did. It's literally what the article, and this thread are about.
      - jader201 8mo ago
        This is about an AI sounding like a human, not a human sounding like a human.
        reactordev 8mo ago
wackget 8mo ago
It's like they tried their hardest to add as much vocal fry [1] as possible. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yL2GezneU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yL2GezneU
quietsegfault 8mo ago
Dude voice, totally. I can’t describe it other than dude voice.
rectang 8mo ago
It doesn't matter if the voice is a perfect facsimile — it only matters whether a court can be persuaded that the result is derivative. As the article notes, the AI doesn't even have to be trained on Greene's voice for him to have a case. > Grimmelmann said Greene doesn’t necessarily have to show definitively that Google trained NotebookLM on his voice to have a case, or even that the voice is 100 percent identical to his. He cited a 1988 case in which the singer and actress Bette Midler successfully sued Ford Motor Company over a commercial that used a voice actor to mimic her distinctive mezzo-soprano. But Greene would then have to show that enough listeners assume it’s Greene’s voice for it to affect either his reputation or his own opportunities to capitalize on it.
- godelski 8mo ago
  In other words, can you guess who someone is impersonating even if their impersonation isn't a perfect simulation? There's a lot of characteristics to people's voices. Tons of people impersonate Trump purely through cadence. Same with Obama. How many singers impersonate Tom Waits?
  - noduerme 8mo ago
    >> How many singers impersonate Tom Waits? Only the pack-a-day smokers, and we're always a dying breed.
xbar 8mo ago
Stolen.
teekert 8mo ago
I also have a hard time hearing it in this example, your second example is just the default NotebookLLM male. But there are much better examples of NotebookLLM cloning voices out there. See my other comments. Btw, are you sure that is the part David Greene is upset about? The NotebookLLM hosts will vary their voice, and jump into and out of different voices in a glitchy manner sometimes. Why is everybody so inclined to defend NotebookLLM here? I've heard Chris Fisher and other Jupiter Broadcasting hosts mimicked , but also leo Laporte (from TWIT) for example. It's obvious it is trained on a lot of open podcasting material and clones a voice every now and then.
hippo22 8mo ago
I don't think this is necessarily a fair comparison. In your sample of David Greene, he's being _interviewed_, which is different than hosting a radio show or podcast. For instance, turn on the nightly news and listen to the very bizarre intonation used by the newscasters. This is something they do for the broadcast, it's not how they normally talk.
binarynate 8mo ago
For a fair comparison, you need to compare audio of David as a broadcaster rather than being interviewed: https://youtu.be/W-uGqHXoSRw?t=5 https://youtu.be/W-uGqHXoSRw?t=5 . As someone who has listened to Greene's voice on NPR a lot over the years, I hear the similarity.

koolba 8mo ago

The 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 ago
Well 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 ago

When 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 ago
Wow, 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 ago

The NotebookLM voice sounds more like Kai Ryssdal to me.

hinkley 8mo ago

I 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.

crazygringo 8mo ago

Yup, it's absolutely not his voice. The NotebookLM voice is pitched significantly higher. Nor does it seem like his voice but changed "just enough" (like in pitch). I agree, he just has a very generic-sounding "podcast guy" voice. And obviously, NotebookLM trained on tons of podcasts and is generating a highly generic, average-sounding voice. Which is why it's pitched higher, since David Greene has a lower than average pitch. This lawsuit is either just to generate buzz to build his personal brand, or maybe he's worried about the competitive threat from AI. But there's no way he's going to win this suit. This isn't like the case with Bette Midler, where Ford intentionally hired someone to mimic her voice.

sailfast 8mo ago
You never know, it might be worth a couple hundred grand in settlement money…
mhuffman 8mo ago
>Yup, it's absolutely not his voice. However it does seem to copy the the way he "lisps" his S's. I am not sure that is common 'generic-sounding "podcast guy" voice'.
- hluska 8mo ago
  When I was university, I got heavy into spoken word poetry and making hip hop. Personal Journals by Sage Francis had become a huge part of my life and rather than focus on school like a mature person I thought I’d make my own album. It turns out I have a profound lack of talent, but I got a lot of experience with a microphone. To me that ‘s’ sound reminds me of the sibilance a Shure SM58 picks up without a pop filter. I hear a different side of the same idea on ‘p’ and ‘b’ as well. I had a speech impediment as a youngster and the sound got in my head. Now I hear it on podcasts.
  - Physkal 8mo ago
    Drop us some heat
- 8mo ago

disposition2 8mo ago

Probably an unpopular opinion on this forum where everyone is considering can something be done vs should something be done, but it sounds like theft to me. But I am also very anti-AI in the artistic space, because if it weren’t for humans freely providing so much artistic content, we wouldn’t have this outcome. And I believe the only end result will be less humans openly sharing knowledge, because some heavily money backed entities will just steal all the art and put it behind a paywall or advertisement. As much as I appreciate the easy search (because actual useful search has become nonexistent since AI) and the ability to ask AI to find some metadata from a large data payload, I also dislike AI, because it has effectively broken the open internet and the willingness for humans to be open to freely sharing knowledge.

csallen 8mo ago
It's not theft, it's copying. Two different words, with two different meanings, and different legality, for very good reason. You can only steal things that can be taken away, which is why theft is bad, because it deprives the original owner of something they once had. Copying does not directly deprive anyone of anything. In fact it just adds more value to the world, and makes it more available to more people. Nobody can "copy" stuff and put it behind a paywall, because the original is still free. It's the prevention of copying that leads to expression being locked behind paywalls. It's said that copying disincentivizes creativity and creation, but in practice it does the opposite. Just look at the incredible amount of music, fiction, software, stories, art, and information that have proliferated since the birth of the web. What copying does do is it indirectly deprives people and companies of the ability monopolize profits on particular expressions without competition. But I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. For example, look at the software industry. I'm extremely grateful that patents and copyright are so rarely enforced in software and UI design, and that we've all been copying the good ideas that came before us for decades with no consequence. I'm grateful the same is true of food recipes, too. I think the world would likely be a richer one if this was true for most fields and art.
- alvah 8mo ago
  That is the best explanation I have seen yet of the difference. I'm definitely stealing it...

apparent 8mo ago

I've listened to tens of hours of NotebookLM, and this doesn't even seem close. If someone had played his voice for me and asked if it sounded like any LLM/bot I was aware of, I would have said no. It would not have even occurred to me that they were thinking of NotebookLM. As @crazygringo said, David's voice is lower. I think it might have some of the same harmonics, but it has some lower ones too, which make the overall sound come across as lower-pitched. I'm not using technical terminology here, so perhaps someone can jump in with the appropriate terms.

amelius 8mo ago
Probably it's what his voice sounds like to himself. Maybe he should listen to his own podcasts more.
- apparent 8mo ago
  I thought about this. IIRC a person's voice sounds deeper in his own head because it reverberates in his skull. if anything, this would make David think the NotebookLM voice sound less like his (since his is already deeper, to begin with). But it's possible that a professional radio host is aware of this effect and adjusts for it when deciding if something sounds like him. Maybe he over-adjusts and thinks this is what he sounds like. As for his wife, it's possible that he speaks in a higher/friendlier register when talking to her/their kids.
  - shermantanktop 8mo ago
    The real question is how high his voice gets when talking to his pets…

tbossanova 8mo ago

Congratulations. I hate both of them. Maybe I’m old but the podcast style of “there might be some interesting information here, but let me tease it for ages with a voice that makes you think something interesting is about to happen…” No sir, I don’t like it

irishcoffee 8mo ago
This is the same reason I’ve watched about 4 hours of YouTube since it launched. Almost all car-repair videos.
- anigbrowl 8mo ago
  I watch a lot of synthesizer videos, and over the years an wholly organic 'no talking' genre has emerged for just this reason. Some people do reviews via subtitles.

spyder 8mo ago

It sounds similar, but doesn't sound the same to me. Also how would you determine the similarity allowed? Maybe if we would have such a measure they could use that in voice model training to not allow that much similarity to a single voice, but if we don't have an agreed upon value for that than it's a subjective "sounds the same to me" rule then it's hard to follow that. Ok, they can say that don't train on their voice, but it's very likely that a blend of voices from an "allowed" set could produce a very similar voice to his.

jader201 8mo ago

Yeah, this shouldn’t even be on HN, or Washington Post for that matter. There are going to be countless people that think AI is using their voice. Humans share remarkably similar voices, but obviously you can’t copy that (other than impersonations, obviously). Unless there is evidence that a company intentionally went after a specific human voice to train their AI, there’s no reason to report on these people claiming AI is using their voice. Maybe if it’s someone with a very distinctive voice. But this guy, as the OP said, just has a “generic podcast guy” voice.

reactordev 8mo ago
You absolutely can copy that, it’s called voice cloning and you can do it on as little as a few seconds of audio. Once cloned, you can generate audio with that voice, saying whatever you want it to.
- jader201 8mo ago
  To be clear, I mean someone can’t file a lawsuit against someone else for sounding like them. Of course you can have an AI target someone else’s voice. My point is that unless there is evidence it was intentional, it’s silly to claim that just because it sounds similar to a human’s voice, that means it must’ve been intentional.
  - reaperducer 8mo ago
    I mean someone can’t file a lawsuit against someone else for sounding like them. But they did. It's literally what the article, and this thread are about.
    - jader201 8mo ago
      This is about an AI sounding like a human, not a human sounding like a human.
      - reactordev 8mo ago

wackget 8mo ago

It's like they tried their hardest to add as much vocal fry [1] as possible. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yL2GezneU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yL2GezneU

quietsegfault 8mo ago

Dude voice, totally. I can’t describe it other than dude voice.

rectang 8mo ago

It doesn't matter if the voice is a perfect facsimile — it only matters whether a court can be persuaded that the result is derivative. As the article notes, the AI doesn't even have to be trained on Greene's voice for him to have a case. > Grimmelmann said Greene doesn’t necessarily have to show definitively that Google trained NotebookLM on his voice to have a case, or even that the voice is 100 percent identical to his. He cited a 1988 case in which the singer and actress Bette Midler successfully sued Ford Motor Company over a commercial that used a voice actor to mimic her distinctive mezzo-soprano. But Greene would then have to show that enough listeners assume it’s Greene’s voice for it to affect either his reputation or his own opportunities to capitalize on it.

godelski 8mo ago
In other words, can you guess who someone is impersonating even if their impersonation isn't a perfect simulation? There's a lot of characteristics to people's voices. Tons of people impersonate Trump purely through cadence. Same with Obama. How many singers impersonate Tom Waits?
- noduerme 8mo ago
  >> How many singers impersonate Tom Waits? Only the pack-a-day smokers, and we're always a dying breed.

xbar 8mo ago

Stolen.

teekert 8mo ago

I also have a hard time hearing it in this example, your second example is just the default NotebookLLM male. But there are much better examples of NotebookLLM cloning voices out there. See my other comments. Btw, are you sure that is the part David Greene is upset about? The NotebookLLM hosts will vary their voice, and jump into and out of different voices in a glitchy manner sometimes. Why is everybody so inclined to defend NotebookLLM here? I've heard Chris Fisher and other Jupiter Broadcasting hosts mimicked , but also leo Laporte (from TWIT) for example. It's obvious it is trained on a lot of open podcasting material and clones a voice every now and then.

hippo22 8mo ago

I don't think this is necessarily a fair comparison. In your sample of David Greene, he's being _interviewed_, which is different than hosting a radio show or podcast. For instance, turn on the nightly news and listen to the very bizarre intonation used by the newscasters. This is something they do for the broadcast, it's not how they normally talk.

binarynate 8mo ago

For a fair comparison, you need to compare audio of David as a broadcaster rather than being interviewed: https://youtu.be/W-uGqHXoSRw?t=5 https://youtu.be/W-uGqHXoSRw?t=5 . As someone who has listened to Greene's voice on NPR a lot over the years, I hear the similarity.