Journalists and Audiobook Narrators File Collective Lawsuit Against Google: Alleging Unauthorized Use of Voice Recordings to Train AI Models

Recently, a group of professionals including Carol Marin, a renowned Chicago journalist; Yohance Lacour, a Pulitzer Prize winner; and Alison Flowers, also a Pulitzer Prize winner, filed a proposed class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The plaintiffs accuse Google of misusing thousands of hours of human voice recordings without permission to train the artificial intelligence models that power its Google Assistant, Gemini Live, and other voice replication systems.

In the complaint, the plaintiffs allege that the tech giant systematically scraped various voice recordings from the internet and used these audio files—which contain unique personal voice characteristics—to optimize and drive its AI voice systems.

The plaintiffs emphasize that their voice recordings perfectly match the characteristics of "optimal training audio" as defined in Google's internal documents, namely: long-form, single-speaker, studio-quality, and professionally produced audio. However, the plaintiffs argue that by feeding these voice recordings—which embody the professional efforts of the individuals involved—into its AI without obtaining the explicit consent of the speakers, Google has not only violated their right of publicity but also breached Illinois' strict Biometric Information Privacy Act. The plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages.

This lawsuit against Google is merely the latest example of the legal storm arising from the massive data collection practices currently prevalent in the AI industry. With the explosive development of generative AI, technology companies' insatiable demand for vast amounts of data to train their models has reached an unprecedented level.

According to relevant media reports, in recent years, dozens of authors, numerous news media organizations, and other content creators have filed similar lawsuits against major technology companies, accusing these enterprises of "stealing" their copyrighted works or proprietary data to train large-scale AI models.

As of now, neither Google nor the attorneys representing the plaintiffs have responded. China Intellectual Property Lawyer Net will continue to provide updates on further developments.