In the latest sign of the age of AI, the National Transportation Safety Board temporarily removed access to its docket system after discovering that the audio of a pilot who died in last year’s UPS plane crash was recreated using AI and circulating on the internet.
The NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including cockpit audio recordings in its transcript system. Otherwise, it contains a large amount of data about investigations and has historically been made available to the public. However, the plane’s accident record included a voice recorder spectrogram file. A spectrogram uses a mathematical process to convert an audio signal containing low and high frequencies into an image.
Scott Manley, a popular YouTuber whose channel combines physics, astronomy, and video games, pointed out on X that it may be possible to reconstruct audio from megabytes of data encoded in images.
And that’s what happened. According to the NTSB, people obtained spectrograms along with publicly available transcripts to create an approximation of the cockpit voice recorder sounds of UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky. According to social media posts, they used AI tools such as Codex.
The agency restored public access to its docket system on Friday, but 42 investigations, including those related to Flight 2976, remained closed pending review.
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