The National Transportation Safety Board temporarily shut down public access to its docket system after discovering that AI technology had been used to recreate the voices of pilots killed in a UPS plane crash. The voices, generated using publicly available spectrogram data from the accident investigation, began circulating online, prompting the agency to restrict access to protect the integrity of ongoing investigations and comply with federal privacy laws.
Federal law prohibits the NTSB from including cockpit audio recordings in its public docket system, which normally contains extensive investigative data. However, the accident docket for UPS Flight 2976, which crashed in Louisville, Kentucky, included a spectrogram file of the cockpit voice recorder. A spectrogram is a visual representation that uses mathematical processes to convert audio frequencies into an image format.
Scott Manley, a popular YouTuber known for content combining physics, astronomy, and video games, pointed out on social media platform X that the megabytes of data encoded in the spectrogram image could potentially be used to reconstruct the original audio. Users then took the spectrogram along with the publicly available transcript and used AI tools including Codex to generate approximations of the cockpit voice recorder audio, according to posts on social media.
The NTSB restored public access to its docket system on Friday but kept 42 investigations closed pending review, including the one related to Flight 2976. The incident highlights the growing challenges that aviation safety agencies face as AI technology advances, making it increasingly difficult to prevent the reconstruction of audio that federal regulations are meant to keep confidential.