“Make money”? The creator loses several thousands of dollars a month hosting the site, and it’s done for free. The Patreon donations are all voluntary and only offer a pittance to the developer.

I highly suggest reading into the project first. The Wiki article I linked before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15.ai) answers all of your questions about copyright infringement.

Feel free to replace "make money" with "collect revenue". This is currently a research project (with funding). However it's long-term goal is to achieve commercial quality voice acting and dubbing. It could be given away for free, sold directly, sold downstream, sold indirectly, or otherwise generate commercial value.

In terms of copyright infringement, your wiki link answers nothing. A court ruled that Google could use copyrighted book text to train an algorithm to improve search results because the copying was highly transformative and did not serve as a market substitute to the original work.

Meanwhile 15.ai is using copyrighted voice recordings to train an algorithm to synthesize new voice recordings that sound like they came from the original speaker. This is radically different from the Google case. Just because one instance of using copyrighted material to train an algorithm qualifies as fair use does not mean that all use of copyright material to train any algorithm also qualifies as fair use.

There is absolutely nothing about this that is settled law. In the next 20 years there are going to be lots of lawsuits, lots of settlements, possibly a few rulings, and maybe even a few new laws. I find the whole topic very interesting. YMMV.

Like you say, the law is not settled on this, but I assume if the author got a takedown request they would probably comply.

In many instances a policy of "ask for forgiveness rather than permission" can get you further, faster. While Nickelodeon are unlikely to grant you a license to the Spongebob voice because that has broader licensing and IP repercussions, they are likely to tolerate a research project using their characters (e.g. just as they have to-date tolerated The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie Rehydrated, which was a fan re-creation of one of their actual movies).

I heavily doubt it's "several thousands of dollars"...

It is indeed several thousands of dollars a month. I can show you AWS invoices, if you're skeptical. Just send me an email and I'd be happy to show proof.

AWS is like 10x as expensive as the competition, most of the time. Have you considered switching hosting providers?

No, you don't need to send me pictures of your invoice...I'll just take your word for it then.

I would imagine it will end with a similar outcome to video game likenesses - a person owns their likeness and you can't create products that includes their likeness without their consent.

What would that mean for parodies though, death of satire. Can likenesses have fair use or perhaps only for for positive representations of the person?

Also he admits to doing all of that or at least a majority of the work while under the funding of MIT...