AI is being used to resurrect the voices of dead pilots

In the latest sign of AI-heavy times, the National Transportation Safety Board temporarily removed access to the docket system after discovering that the voices of the pilots killed in last year’s UPS flight crash had been recreated using AI and are circulating online.

The NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including the cockpit voice recorder in its docket system, which otherwise contains most of the information on the investigation and has been open to the public. But the plane’s crash port contained the spectrogram file of the voice recorder. Spectrograms use math to convert audio signals, including low and high frequencies, into an image.

Scott Manley, a popular YouTuber whose approach combines physics, astronomy, and video games, written on X to be able to recreate the audio from the megabytes of data contained in the image.

And that’s what happened. People took the spectrogram, along with publicly available recordings, to create a simulation of the cockpit voice recorder from UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky, according to the NTSB. They used AI tools like Codex, according to posts on social media.

Organization restored public access to the docket system on Friday but 42 investigations were closed pending review – including the one related to Flight 2976.