Can an AI voice take a radio host’s identity? A California court says the question deserves a full hearing. Former NPR host David Greene’s suit over NotebookLM’s male AI host survived Google’s challenge on all four claims, though the court has not yet ruled on the facts.
Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Shella Deen overruled Google’s demurrer, a legal challenge to the sufficiency of the claims, to all four causes of action in David Greene’s complaint, in an order filed October 23. The ruling does not decide whether Greene’s claims are true, but at this stage, the court takes the complaint’s allegations as true.
Greene hosted NPR’s Morning Edition for almost 10 years, hosted NPR’s Up First podcast, and reported on the White House for NPR for four years. He now hosts Left, Right & Center and other podcasts. He alleges that Google used recordings of his voice to create the default male voice for the Audio Overviews feature in NotebookLM, then used that voice to market and sell the product without his permission.
Audio Overviews, introduced in September 2024, turns documents a user uploads into a podcast-style conversation between two AI hosts, one male and one female. According to the complaint, Google offers NotebookLM through paid subscriptions, including the $19.99-per-month Google One AI Premium tier, and used the voice in a December 2024 Spotify partnership. The complaint cites listeners who wrote that the male voice “sounds exactly like” Greene, and a forensic voice-recognition firm that found “relatively high” evidence of a match.
Greene filed the case on January 23. Google moved it to federal court, and a US District Court judge in the Northern District of California sent it back on July 23. His four claims are a statutory right of publicity under California Civil Code section 3344, unfair competition, common law misappropriation, and quasi-contract and unjust enrichment. He seeks damages, restitution, disgorgement, and injunctive relief.
Google argued that the complaint shows only that Greene’s journalism, not his voice, is well known. Deen wrote in the order, “That distinction is difficult to maintain for a radio broadcaster. A radio host reaches the audience through the voice, and it is reasonable to infer that the voice is widely known.”
Deen also stressed the limits of the ruling. She wrote, “Whether Google actually made the male host’s voice from Greene’s recordings or from another source that merely resembles him is a factual question.”
She added, “The court recognizes that this is a novel application of a statute enacted well before generative AI.”
The court rejected Google’s argument that the Copyright Act preempts the claims, finding that a voice is not copyrightable and that the claims concern the program’s outputs, not its inputs.
The case lands as radio talent weighs how well their voices are protected. In the US Congress, the NO FAKES Act, which would create a federal right to control digital replicas of a voice, stalled in October, with no action expected until the session resumes following midterms.
