Artificial intelligence is being used to revive the voices of dead pilots

In the latest sign of these difficult times for AI, the National Transportation Safety Board has temporarily removed access to its docket system after discovering that the voices of pilots killed in a UPS plane crash last year had been recreated using AI and circulated online.

Federal law prohibits the NTSB from including cockpit audio recordings in its docket system, which otherwise contains data sets related to investigations and has historically been open to the public. But the accident log of this flight included a voice recorder spectral file. A spectrogram uses a mathematical process to convert audio signals, including low and high frequencies, into an image.

Scott Manley, a popular YouTuber whose channel combines physics, astronomy and video games, pointed out in X that it might be possible to reconstruct the audio using megabytes of data encoded in that image.

And this is what happened. People took the spectrogram, along with publicly available text, to create rough estimates for the cockpit voice recorder from UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky, according to the NTSB. They used artificial intelligence tools such as Codex, according to social media posts.

The agency restored public access to the claims system on Friday, but kept 42 investigations closed pending review — including the investigation into Flight 2976.