This view is too simplistic. AIs could enable someone with moderate knowledge to create chemical and biological weapons, sabotage firmware, or write highly destructive computer viruses. At least to some extent, uncontrolled AI has the potential to give people all kinds of destructive skills that are normally rare and much more controlled. The analogy with the hammer doesn't really fit.
I'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.
If 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.
Doesn'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.
Unlikely. 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!"
What the US Supreme Court decides is much less relevant than it used to be because the US executive can and will simply ignore the decision. If anyone in the US administration breaks the law, they can be pardoned by the US president,if the president breaks the law, he's immune against prosecution based on a previous decision of the Supreme Court, and no court can enforce anything if the executive doesn't comply with the court order.
Does it even matter when in reality it's more likely that this is intentional anti-competitive behavior by Google?
They once made all emails from my very reputable small German email provider (a company that has existed and provided email services long before Google existed) go into a black whole - not bounce them back or anything like that, mind you, their servers accepted them and made them disappear forever. I was in contact with the technicians then to get the problem fixed and they told me it's very difficult for them to even reach anyone at Google. It took them several days to get the problem fixed.
Of course, no one will ever be able to prove an intention behind these kind of "technical glitches." Nothing of significance ever happened when Google had large optics fiber connections with NSA installed illegally and claimed to have no knowledge of it, so certainly nothing will happen when small issues with interoperability occur and drive more people to Gmail.
At scale, it's very hard to distinguish malicious intent from the simple consequence of being the largest operator in a space so any motion one makes makes waves.
For what it's worth: having seen some of how the sausage is made, Google isn't particularly interested in screwing over a small reputable German provider. But they also aren't particularly interested in supporting such a provider's desire to route messages to their users because the provider is small. At their scale, "I've forgotten how to count that low" is a real effect. And email, as a protocol, has been pretty busted for decades; it's not Google that made the protocol so open-ended and messy to implement in a way that providers will agree is correct.
> Nothing of significance ever happened when Google had large optics fiber connections with NSA installed illegally and claimed to have no knowledge of it
Nothing of significance outside Google. Inside, Google initiated a technical lift that turned their intranet into an untrusted-by-default ecosystem so that data was encrypted on the fiber (as well as between machines within a datacenter, to head off future compromised-employee attacks). That process took at least five years; I suppose there's a scenario where it was all smoke and mirrors, but being on the inside in the middle of the process, I watched several C-suite who are not particularly good actors be bloody pissed at the US government for putting itself into Google's "threat actor" box and making that much work for the system engineering teams.
Actors in a theater. I have no reason to believe they were pretending to be upset because the were actually spies and knew what was going on before Snowden's reveals came out. They were as surprised as everyone else; the NSA wiretapping was done off-prem in cable that was privately owned (but stretched hundreds of miles and was, therefore, practically undefendable against compromise).
Long time ago when I was managing ISP email relay and customers asked "Where is the message I've sent?" seeing in the logs message accepted by receiving SMTP server was the end of the debug for me: I just handed the customer the part of the log and suggested talking to the receiving side IT administrator.
The answer to that question is always the same. Join a party and become politically active. Or, if you really can't find any party that represents your views, join an NGO and become active in it. If you're too lazy for that, consider paying an NGO that does spectacular actions that have a public impact. And never vote for any parties that don't do anything for better climate control, of course.
^This. Even if there was a demand for hand-crafted software, it would be very hard to prove it was hand-crafted, but it's unlikely there could be a demand for the same reasons as there is no market for e.g. luxury software. As opposed to physical goods, software consumers care for the result, not how it was created.
I have to sign off on the code. When I use compilers and 3rd-party libraries, I choose them very carefully. When I use an AI assistant, I have to check that it produces a good enough quality that I can sign off on it and stand behind it as if it was my own. I cannot do that with large amounts of agentic code, only with small enough snippets that I can overlook and check.
You can put it another way: If my customers lose data because of a nasty bug and it was because there was an error in the compiler, it wasn't my fault (unless I chose some unfinished hobby compiler with no reputation at all). If my AI assistant wrote the bug and I didn't spot it, the bug was definitely my fault and is fully my responsibility.
"It wasn't me, my AI assistant did it" is a lousy excuse.
Very interesting, great work! This reminded me of something. I just checked and to my amazement Mike Hore's Powermops is still around and even has an ARM version.[1]
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