A group of professional audiobook narrators, podcasters, and independent journalists has filed a class-action lawsuit against Google. In the lawsuit, renowned actress Lindsey Dorcus, Viktoria Nassif, and a group of investigative journalists accuse the tech giant of using their voices to train commercial neural networks without authorization. According to the complaint, Google has flagrantly violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). This is reported by Ixbt.com .
Case documents state that the corporation used hundreds of thousands of hours of human speech recordings to create services such as Gemini Live, NotebookLM, automatic dubbing on YouTube, and Google Cloud Text-to-Speech. The algorithms extracted unique biometric identifiers (voiceprints) of specific speakers from these audio materials. The plaintiffs emphasize that they were never warned that their intellectual property and biological data would serve as a source for Google products, nor did they provide any consent.
Lawyers explain that a voiceprint is like a person's digital fingerprint and cannot be changed. While a social security number or credit card can be replaced, a stolen voiceprint cannot, as biological speech patterns remain with a person for life. This poses a serious threat to user privacy.
The core of the lawsuit is that Google's technologies are now directly competing with these professionals in the labor market. For example, the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech service is offered to audiobook publishers as a cheap alternative to live narrators. Meanwhile, NotebookLM creates ready-made podcasts, devaluing the work of journalists. Such AI products are priced significantly lower than the services of real professionals.
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