Nine lawsuits accuse tech giants of using journalists' voices to train AI without consent
Nine class action lawsuits filed this week in Chicago's federal court allege that Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Adobe, Samsung, ElevenLabs and NVIDIA collected and used the voices of well-known journalists, podcasters and voice actors to train artificial intelligence systems without permission.
The cases represent a significant expansion of Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA, which has generated thousands of lawsuits and millions in settlements since the 1990s. Most prior litigation focused on fingerprints collected by timeclock systems. A Facebook settlement in 2020 addressed facial recognition.
The named plaintiffs include retired NBC 5 journalists Carol Marin and Phil Rogers, along with podcast hosts Yohance Lacour and Alison Flowers, audiobook narrator Lindsay Dorcus, voice actor Victoria Nassif, and journalist Robin Amer. All are Illinois residents.
What the lawsuits claim
The complaints allege the companies ingested recordings of voices to train their AI "foundational voice models" without ever notifying the plaintiffs or obtaining written consent, as BIPA requires.
"None of them was told that their voice was being used to train Amazon's commercial voice AI," the lawsuit against Amazon states. "None of them was asked. None of them consented."
The lawsuits define a voiceprint as a digital fingerprint of the human voice - a mathematical representation that includes pitch, timbre and resonance determined by a speaker's physiology. Speech patterns developed over a lifetime, including accent, cadence and articulation, also form part of a voiceprint.
Unlike a Social Security number, which can be reissued, a voiceprint cannot be recovered once compromised. "A person whose voiceprint has been taken cannot recover it by altering their voice - the biological and behavioral patterns that produced the voiceprint are the same ones used to speak every day," the complaints say.
Why BIPA matters for writers and voice professionals
BIPA requires companies to obtain written consent before collecting biometric information. The law treats biometric data as fundamentally different from other personal information because it is unique and irreplaceable.
Ross Kimbarovsky, an attorney with Chicago-based firm Loevy & Loevy, said the companies built a "billion-dollar industry on stolen voices because they thought no one would make them pay for it." He characterized the conduct as "one of the largest violations of biometric privacy ever committed."
None of the named companies responded to requests for comment on the lawsuits.
Precedent exists, but voiceprints are new territory
In early 2023, Whole Foods - acquired by Amazon in 2017 - settled a BIPA case for $300,000 with 330 warehouse employees who alleged the company collected their voiceprints without permission to verify worker identities. That settlement marked the first BIPA payout focused on voiceprint collection.
Industry experts believe the current cases could hinge on whether courts determine the voiceprints are identifiable. If judges allow these cases to proceed, voiceprint litigation may become a major focus for BIPA attorneys as AI training practices face increased scrutiny.
The lawsuits name text-to-speech technology and voice modulation systems as key applications of the collected voice data.
Your membership also unlocks:
