> But since actual recordings of his voice were used in order to train

Tell that to all the ppl who contributed to Co-Pilots training set..

I have the same reservations

That said, I think there's a slight difference in that this is targeting a specific individual.

I mean, yeah? That's also something we need to seriously consider. These tools have the ability to copy the labor and property of others in a way that is economically important and socially challenging, and we don't yet have a legal framework to handle it.

Should an actor playing a public figure in a biopic have to get permission to study the subject's voice from copyrighted sources in order to reproduce it for the film (without AI)?

Can actors audio-visually mimic their characters with increasingly convincing realism, and can they be artificially scaled, duplicated, extended, and applied for just the cost of a bit of hardware and electricity?

It is not sensible to hand wave the "human like" learning process and ignore economic reality. This area requires careful thought about how our notions of individual rights apply to new technologies, and what kind of economic system can exist as a result.

One of the popular sentiments here seems to be that training AI should not be treated any different than a human understanding & learning the source material.

Going by that logic, can the AI here be considered a "person" performing mimicry after being "inspired" by Attenborough ?

That attitude sounds... convenient for people (companies) training these models, but completely untenable at a societal level.