In the latest sign of these AI-heavy times, the National Transportation Safety Board temporarily revoked access to its docket system after discovering that the voices of the pilots killed in last year’s UPS plane crash had been recreated using artificial intelligence and circulated online.
The NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including the cockpit voice recordings in its docket system, which otherwise contains a wealth of information about investigations and has historically been open to the public. However, the accident file for this flight included the recorder’s spectrogram file. A spectrogram uses a mathematical process to convert audio signals, including low and high frequencies, into an image.
Famous YouTuber Scott Manley combines physics, astronomy and video games on his channel, It was mentioned in X it may be possible to reconstruct the sound from the megabytes of data encoded in that image.
And so it happened. People took the spectrogram along with the publicly available transcript to create an estimate of the cockpit voice recorder from UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky. According to the NTSB. According to posts on social media, they used artificial intelligence tools like Codex.
Agency has been restored Public access to the docket system on Friday, however, left 42 investigations closed to review, including those related to Flight 2976.
