Some of the world’s biggest technology companies are facing proposed class-action lawsuits in Chicago over allegations that they used thousands of hours of recorded human voices without permission to develop and train artificial intelligence systems.
The lawsuits target Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Samsung, alongside Google, Adobe and AI voice company ElevenLabs. The cases were filed in federal court in Illinois by journalists, podcasters, audiobook narrators and voice actors who allege that their voices were collected from publicly available recordings and processed into voiceprints for AI training without their knowledge or consent.
At the heart of the legal battle is Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), one of the strongest biometric privacy laws in the United States. The law generally requires companies collecting biometric information to provide notice, obtain informed consent and establish policies governing the storage and destruction of the data.
The plaintiffs argue that their voices are not simply ordinary pieces of publicly available content. According to the lawsuits, the companies allegedly extracted unique characteristics from the recordings to create voiceprints and used those biometric identifiers to help train commercial AI voice and speech systems.
Among those involved in the cases are prominent journalists, podcasters and professional voice artists, including former Chicago television journalists Carol Marin and Phil Rogers, as well as audiobook narrators and podcast hosts. The lawsuits claim that recordings from podcasts, YouTube videos, audiobooks and other publicly accessible sources were used without the required consent.
The companies are pushing back against the allegations. Several defendants have argued that the claims are speculative and that Illinois’ biometric privacy law should not apply where the alleged collection or processing of the data occurred outside the state. Some also dispute whether the plaintiffs have established that their specific recordings were actually used to train the companies’ AI systems.
The cases could have major implications for the rapidly expanding AI industry. Voice technology has become an important part of modern AI products, from virtual assistants and text-to-speech tools to automated dubbing and voice-generation systems. Companies developing these technologies rely on enormous amounts of human speech to improve their models.
That has created a growing debate over where the line should be drawn between publicly accessible content and biometric information that requires an individual’s permission before it can be processed.
The financial stakes could also be significant. Plaintiffs’ lawyers say the lawsuits could expose each defendant to potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, depending on how the court interprets Illinois’ biometric privacy law and the number of alleged violations.
The legal fight is therefore about more than whether AI companies can use publicly available recordings. It could help determine whether a person’s voice can be treated as protected biometric data when artificial intelligence systems extract and learn from its unique characteristics.
As AI companies continue to build increasingly sophisticated voice models, the Chicago lawsuits could become an important test of how privacy laws apply to AI training—and whether companies will need explicit permission before turning people’s voices into data for commercial artificial intelligence.
Discover more from Scoop Hub
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
