It doesn't matter whether it sounds distinctive to you. What matters is whether it's close enough to the real person's voice to be an infringement.

Just like it doesn't matter if you used a machine to duplicate a painting. It's still an infringement.

You can't publish a Harry Potter novel and then throw up your hands and say, "It wasn't me. The AI decided to name the characters Hargid and Hermione and Snape."

Google says it paid a voice actor. If it provides proof of that, good. But like with a lot of AI things, we're in new territory here.

Seems like there's a market for a tool that can compare an AI voice to a library of known famous voices so that companies like Google can tweak their machines to not sound too much like someone who can be harmed by a sound-alike.

I kept listening waiting to hear the voice that was supposed to sound like him, and never did.

Was it the first one (I heard three different voices during the clip)? That one is considerably deeper than the podcaster's voice, and has different tones, too. It definitely wasn't the last one, that one was much higher pitched (and then a female voice in the middle).

Feels like a big stretch, to say the least. But I can tell a big difference between the two.

Ultimately, it's like some of the music copyright lawsuits, where they're suing over chord progression. There are a billion voices on the planet -- any AI generated voice is going to sound similar to someone else's real voice (and again, I don't hear it at all in this case).

EDIT: So it's the third voice apparently. The pitch is close, but the tones and accents still definitely feel "off" enough that it doesn't sound like they were intentionally going for this guy. It still feels like a stretch to me, but not as much as the first voice did.

But it is always possible that this is what Chris sounds like in his own head. Nobody listening to audio will hear it the way he does.

So I would say that where there is smoke there is sometimes fire at this point.