In the latest sign of the AI-heavy era, the National Transportation Safety Board temporarily removed access to its document system after discovering that the voice of a pilot who died in a UPS plane crash last year was being recreated using AI and disseminated on the Internet.
The NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including cockpit audio recordings in its incident recording system. These recordings contain research-related data and have historically been available to the public. However, the accident log 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 whose channel combines physics, astronomy, and video games, commented on X that it may be possible to reconstruct the audio from the megabytes of data encoded in those images.
And it happened. According to the NTSB, the people took the spectrograms, along with publicly available transcripts, to create an approximation of the cockpit voice recorder audio from UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky. According to social media posts, they used AI tools like Codex.
The agency restored public access to its filing system on Friday but closed 42 investigations pending review, including those related to Title 2976.
