In the latest sign of these AI-heavy times, the National Transportation Safety Board temporarily removed access to its docket system after discovering that the voices of the pilots killed in last year’s UPS plane crash were recreated using AI and being broadcast on the Internet.
The NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including cockpit audio recordings in its docket system, which otherwise contains a repository of data on investigations and has historically been open to the public. But the accident docket for this flight included a spectrogram file from the voice recorder. A spectrogram uses a mathematical process to convert sound signals, including low and high frequencies, into an image.
Scott Manley, a popular YouTuber channel that combines physics, astronomy, and video games, Noted on It may be possible to reconstruct the audio from the megabytes of data encoded in that image.
And the same thing happened. People took spectrograms, along with a publicly available transcript, to approximate cockpit voice recorder audio from UPS flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky. According to NTSB. According to posts on social media, they used AI tools like Codex.
Agency Public access to docket system restored Friday, leaving 42 investigations, including those related to Flight 2976, pending until the review is completed.
