NPR Host David Greene Alleged Google's NotebookLM Replicated His Voice Without Consent, Prompting Lawsuit

January 23, 2026

Google LLC and Alphabet are under scrutiny following NPR host David Greene's lawsuit in Santa Clara County, asserting that the synthetic male voice of NotebookLM's Audio Overviews mimics his cadence and delivery without consent or compensation. The complaint cites an independent voice-recognition analysis with a 53-60% confidence level in his voice training the model. Google has deemed the allegations as baseless, stating the voice is based on a paid actor. This incident underscores the importance of trustworthy AI practices and HISPI Project Cerebellum's efforts to establish guardrails for safe and secure AI.

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MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.569, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.551, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 6.1 — similarity 0.549, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: google
Alleged developer: google
Alleged harmed parties: voice-actors, david-greene

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1386

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.