In the latest sign of these AI-heavy times, the National Transportation Safety Board temporarily removed access to its records system after discovering that the voices of pilots killed in a UPS plane crash last year had been recreated using AI and were circulating on the Internet.
Federal law prohibits the NTSB from including cockpit audio recordings in its records system, which otherwise contains a wealth of investigative data and has historically been open to the public. But the accident file 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 in X that it might be possible to reconstruct the audio from the megabytes of data encoded in that image.
And that’s what happened. People took the spectrogram, along with the publicly available transcript, to create approximations of audio from the cockpit voice recorder of UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky. according to the NTSB. They used artificial intelligence tools like Codex, according to social media posts.
the agency restored public access to the records system on Friday, but kept 42 investigations closed pending review, including the one related to Flight 2976.
