AI is being used to resurrect the voices of dead pilots
In the latest sign of these AI-tough times, the National Transportation Safety Board temporarily removed access to its docket system after discovering that voices of pilots killed in a UPS plane crash last year had been recreated using AI and circulating on the internet.
The NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including cockpit audio recordings in its docket system, which otherwise contains a wealth of investigation data and has historically been open to the public. But the accident documentation 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, noted on X that it might be possible to reconstruct audio from the megabytes of data encoded in that image.
And that’s what happened. People used the spectrogram, along with the publicly available transcript, to make approximations of the audio from the cockpit voice recorder of UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky. according to the NTSB. They used AI tools such as Codex, according to social media posts.
The agency restored had access to the records system on Friday, but kept 42 investigations closed pending review – including the investigation involving Flight 2976.
