/s3/static.nrc.nl/images/gn4/stripped/data144175140-b3061e.jpg)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: David Greene had never heard of NotebookLM, Google's buzzy artificial intelligence tool that spins up podcasts on demand, until a former colleague emailed him to ask if he'd lent it his voice. "So... I'm probably the 148th person to ask this, but did you license your voice to Google?" the former co-worker asked in a fall 2024 email. "It sounds very much like you!"
Greene, a public radio veteran who has hosted NPR's "Morning Edition" and KCRW's political podcast "Left, Right & Center," looked up the tool, listening to the two virtual co-hosts -- one male and one female -- engage in light banter. "I was, like, completely freaked out," Greene said. "It's this eerie moment where you feel like you're listening to yourself." Greene felt the male voice sounded just like him -- from the cadence and intonation to the occasional "uhhs" and "likes" that Greene had worked over the years to minimize but never eliminated. He said he played it for his wife and her eyes popped.
As emails and texts rolled in from friends, family members and co-workers, asking if the AI podcast voice was his, Greene became convinced he'd been ripped off. Now he's suing Google, alleging that it violated his rights by building a product that replicated his voice without payment or permission, giving users the power to make it say things Greene would never say. Google told The Washington Post in a statement on Thursday that NotebookLM's male podcast voice has nothing to do with Greene. Now a Santa Clara County, California, court may be asked to determine whether the resemblance is uncanny enough that ordinary people hearing the voice would assume it's his -- and if so, what to do about it. Greene's lawsuit cites an unnamed AI forensic firm that used its software to compare the artificial voice to Greene's. It gave a confidence rating of 53-60% that Greene's voice was used to train the model, which it considers "relatively high" confidence.
"If I was David Greene I would be upset, not just because they stole my voice," but because they used it to make the podcasting equivalent of AI "slop," said Mike Pesca, host of "The Gist" podcast and a former colleague of Greene's at NPR. "They have banter, but it's very surface-level, un-insightful banter, and they're always saying, 'Yeah, that's so interesting.' It's really bad, because what do we as show hosts have except our taste in commentary and pointing our audience to that which is interesting?"
Greene, a public radio veteran who has hosted NPR's "Morning Edition" and KCRW's political podcast "Left, Right & Center," looked up the tool, listening to the two virtual co-hosts -- one male and one female -- engage in light banter. "I was, like, completely freaked out," Greene said. "It's this eerie moment where you feel like you're listening to yourself." Greene felt the male voice sounded just like him -- from the cadence and intonation to the occasional "uhhs" and "likes" that Greene had worked over the years to minimize but never eliminated. He said he played it for his wife and her eyes popped.
As emails and texts rolled in from friends, family members and co-workers, asking if the AI podcast voice was his, Greene became convinced he'd been ripped off. Now he's suing Google, alleging that it violated his rights by building a product that replicated his voice without payment or permission, giving users the power to make it say things Greene would never say. Google told The Washington Post in a statement on Thursday that NotebookLM's male podcast voice has nothing to do with Greene. Now a Santa Clara County, California, court may be asked to determine whether the resemblance is uncanny enough that ordinary people hearing the voice would assume it's his -- and if so, what to do about it. Greene's lawsuit cites an unnamed AI forensic firm that used its software to compare the artificial voice to Greene's. It gave a confidence rating of 53-60% that Greene's voice was used to train the model, which it considers "relatively high" confidence.
"If I was David Greene I would be upset, not just because they stole my voice," but because they used it to make the podcasting equivalent of AI "slop," said Mike Pesca, host of "The Gist" podcast and a former colleague of Greene's at NPR. "They have banter, but it's very surface-level, un-insightful banter, and they're always saying, 'Yeah, that's so interesting.' It's really bad, because what do we as show hosts have except our taste in commentary and pointing our audience to that which is interesting?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A proposal within the Fedora Linux community suggests improving the kernel's DRM Panic screen to a more user-friendly, BSOD-style experience. Phoronix reports: Open-source developer Jose Exposito proposed today a nicer experience for DRM Panic integration on Fedora. Rather than using DRM Panic with just the kernel log contents being encoded in the QR code displayed when a kernel panic occurs, the proposal is to have a customized Fedora web-page with the encoded QR contents to be shown on that web page. Besides having a more pleasant UI/UX, from this web page the intent would also be to make it easier to report this error to the Fedora BugZilla. Being able to easily pass the kernel log to the Fedora bug tracker could help in making upstream aware of the problem(s) and seeing if other users are also encountering similar panics.
Right now this idea was just raised earlier today as a "request for comments" on the Fedora mailing list. While a prototype at this point, Exposito already developed a basic web interface for demoing the solution.
Right now this idea was just raised earlier today as a "request for comments" on the Fedora mailing list. While a prototype at this point, Exposito already developed a basic web interface for demoing the solution.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
mikeleonardvisualarts has added a photo to the pool:
mikeleonardvisualarts posted a photo:
Wisdom the Laysan albatross arrived back at her nesting grounds on February 4th.
This marks at least the 70th time she has safely arrived home at Kuaihelani (Midway Atoll) (she was first banded in 1956 by wildlife biologist Chandler Robbins). Estimated to be at least 75 years old this year, she is the world's oldest known wild bird. In 2021, the Audubon Society published an in-depth feature on her life and times. She's still going strong: she lost a mate in 2020-2021, but she found a new mate in 2024 and her youngest baby (so far!) was hatched on Jan 30, 2025 (adorable images & video at that link!) (Previously)
This marks at least the 70th time she has safely arrived home at Kuaihelani (Midway Atoll) (she was first banded in 1956 by wildlife biologist Chandler Robbins). Estimated to be at least 75 years old this year, she is the world's oldest known wild bird. In 2021, the Audubon Society published an in-depth feature on her life and times. She's still going strong: she lost a mate in 2020-2021, but she found a new mate in 2024 and her youngest baby (so far!) was hatched on Jan 30, 2025 (adorable images & video at that link!) (Previously)
Branding Illustrations: Finance, Insurance
Last summer, Richard Worth reached out to see if I’d be interested in attending a jQuery Reunion. I’ve only been to one other conference (Beyond Tellerand) in the last five years and a reunion seemed like the best opportunity to reconnect with people I hadn’t seen in a long time.
I was trepidatious going into it as I had no idea who would be in attendance. Did everybody I knew from way back when decide to say no? How many people were even going to be there?
Thankfully, my fears were unfounded and I had a blast. There was a group of folks that I remember from back in the day like Nathan, Karl, Kyle, Marc, Mike, and Paul, and I also got to meet some new people like fellow Canadians, Darcy and Ryan. Nathan brought his teenage son, who was very inquisitive and seemed to really enjoy talking tech with everybody.
We went to a vintage arcade the first night, played classic games and ate pizza. The next day, we did go-karting, sim racing, and enjoyed some BBQ for lunch. I sucked at go-karting but kicked ass at sim racing. Then we went back to the hotel for the “conference” part where folks did short talks on topics that interested them.
John Resig wasn’t able to attend in person but did call in to present on his passion of Japanese art.
Nathan and I remarked that we felt a little out of place with most of the people there having been or currently are heavily involved with jQuery including contributing core code or organizing conferences. I would’ve considered myself more a jQuery groupie, sitting on the edges of the community. Photos were shared of those early conferences, a couple of which I thought I had attended but not being able to find myself in those early photos had me doubting the accuracy of my memory. I’ve gone through my own photos and found a couple I had taken. Whew, I’m not going crazy.
The jQuery team officially launched jQuery 4.0 at the reunion, which was cool. It’s impressive to think that this library is still chugging along after 20 years and still powering so much of the web. PrototypeJS, Scriptaculous, and jQuery are probably the three libraries that really invigorated my joy of JavaScript and helped me learn about how powerful of a language it really was.
Our industry feels more grown up and I miss how fun it felt in those earlier days. I’m also delighted with how things have changed since then to make our reliance on these tools less necessary (or maybe just reliant on a different set of tools).
Reply via email