AI is being used to resurrect the voices of dead pilots
Key takeaways
- NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including cockpit audio recordings in its docket system, which otherwise contains troves of data on investigations and has historically been open to the public.
- Scott Manley, a popular YouTuber channel who combines physics, astronomy, and video games, noted on X that it could be possible to reconstruct audio from the megabytes of data encoded in that image.
- People took the spectrogram, along with the publicly available transcript, to create approximations of the cockpit voice recorder audio from UPS flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky, according to the NTSB.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
In the latest sign of these AI-heavy times, the National Transportation Safety Board temporarily removed access to its docket system after discovering that voices of pilots who were killed in a UPS plane crash last year had been recreated using AI and were circulating on the internet.
NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including cockpit audio recordings in its docket system, which otherwise contains troves of data on investigations and has historically been open to the public. But the accident docket for this flight included a spectrogram file of the voice recorder. A spectrogram uses a mathematical process to turn sound signals, including low and high frequencies, into an image.
Scott Manley, a popular YouTuber channel who combines physics, astronomy, and video games, noted on X that it could be possible to reconstruct audio from the megabytes of data encoded in that image.