Worrying: AI is bringing dead pilots back to life
What's the story
In a shocking development, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in the US temporarily suspended access to its docket system. The move comes after it was found that the voices of pilots who died in a UPS plane crash last year had been recreated using artificial intelligence (AI) and were available online. The NTSB's docket system contains a wealth of data on investigations and is open to the public. However, federal law prohibits including cockpit audio recordings in this system.
Data analysis
Spectrogram file of the voice recorder
The accident docket for the UPS flight included a spectrogram file of the voice recorder. A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies in a sound signal, created by a mathematical process. Scott Manley, a popular YouTuber who combines physics, astronomy, and gaming on his channel, suggested that it might be possible to reconstruct audio from the megabytes of data encoded in that file.
Tech
NTSB has restored public access to its docket system
Manley's suggestion turned out to be true as people used the spectrogram and a publicly available transcript to create approximations of the cockpit voice recorder audio from UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky. They employed AI tools like Codex for this purpose, as per social media posts. The NTSB has since restored public access to its docket system but kept 42 investigations closed pending review, including one related to Flight 2976.