The National Transportation Safety Board temporarily shut down public access to its docket system this week after learning that people used artificial intelligence to recreate the voices of pilots who died in a UPS plane crash last year.
The agency discovered that audio approximations of the cockpit voice recorder from UPS Flight 2976, which crashed in Louisville, Kentucky, had been created using AI tools and were circulating online. The NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including actual cockpit audio recordings in its docket system, which otherwise contains detailed investigation data and has historically been open to the public.
How the Recreation Happened
The accident docket for the flight included a spectrogram file of the voice recorder. A spectrogram is a visual representation of sound that uses a mathematical process to turn audio signals, including low and high frequencies, into an image. This image contained enough data to potentially reconstruct the original audio.
Scott Manley, a popular YouTuber known for combining physics, astronomy, and video games, pointed out on X that the megabytes of data encoded in that spectrogram image could be used to reconstruct audio. Following his observation, individuals took the spectrogram along with the publicly available transcript of the cockpit recording to create approximate recreations of the audio.
According to posts on social media, the recreations were made using AI tools like Codex. Codex is an AI system that can generate code and process data, though it was not originally designed for audio reconstruction.
NTSB Response and Ongoing Investigations
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The NTSB restored public access to its docket system on Friday but kept 42 investigations closed pending further review. The Flight 2976 case was among those that remained sealed. The agency has not commented on whether it will take additional steps to prevent similar AI recreations in the future.
The incident highlights a growing challenge for investigators as AI tools become more accessible and capable of extracting information from limited data sources. While the NTSB's docket system is meant to provide transparency, it also contains sensitive information that can be manipulated in unexpected ways.
Background on UPS Flight 2976
UPS Flight 2976 was a cargo flight that crashed in Louisville last year. The National Transportation Safety Board has been investigating the cause of the crash. The cockpit voice recorder is a key piece of evidence in such investigations, but federal law prohibits its public release to protect privacy and ongoing investigations.
The use of AI to recreate the pilots' voices from a spectrogram and transcript raises questions about the boundaries of public data and the potential for new forms of privacy violations.