In an eerie development, artificial intelligence has been used to recreate the voices of pilots who tragically lost their lives in a UPS plane crash last year. The National Transportation Safety Board temporarily closed access to its docket system after discovering that spectrograms of cockpit recordings had been converted into audible sound.

Scott Manley, a YouTuber, noted on X that it was possible to reconstruct audio from the megabytes of data encoded in the spectrogram. This led individuals to use AI tools, like Codex, to create approximations of the cockpit voice recorder audio for UPS Flight 2976.

The NTSB restored public access to its docket system on Friday but remains cautious, keeping 42 investigations closed pending review – including the one related to this incident. This case raises interesting questions about privacy and the ethical implications of AI technology in our increasingly digitized world.