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fn-mote 22 hours ago [-]
Grisly, but I’m against restrictions on releasing what should be public information. Even if they came from the 1990s.
These knee-jerk reactions, creating special case rules, really seem like a negative to me.
Just wait for a ban on posting dash cam or police body cam recordings.
wrs 21 hours ago [-]
Before you advocate changing an extremely successful safety culture because you want to apply abstract principles, you might want to do some Chesterton's Fence thinking. Aviation safety depends on fearless analysis of objective data and blameless reporting, which is a very unnatural and sometimes counterintuitive framework for humans to operate in.
The NTSB releases transcripts of cockpit voice recordings, just not the literal voices. This is a human consideration that doesn't affect the quality or transparency of the analysis.
dlcarrier 19 hours ago [-]
The NTSB's publishing of the transcript but not the recording is a pretty standard means for providing full privacy while increasing safety. A recording allows an incident analysis which is extremely useful in updating safety procedures to prevent incidents and plan for the ones that do occur. Publishing the raw sound recording reduces privacy with no increase in safety, but publishing an analysis of the recordings does not harm privacy, while getting the entire safety benefit.
This is different than a privacy vs liability conflict, where a recording isn't going to provide a safety benefit, it'll just move liability around, where there's far more controversy over publishing any analysis of the recording, or even creating one in the first place.
The NTSB should never have published the unredacted spectrograph, as it is effectively a raw sound recording.
sokoloff 21 hours ago [-]
On what basis should the recording of voices of identifiable flight crew (often the last words of people soon-to-perish, perhaps unknowingly) be public information?
You seem fairly sure that the public has a right to hear them and that view is not universal and I'm not even sure is a majority view.
halJordan 20 hours ago [-]
The basis is that it's public domain data. And the public a) owns it and b) has property rights that are assertable without cause.
A long time ago (before the infantilization of the American public) this was the default, majority rule. And it's still reflected as the default position in the US Code.
sokoloff 20 hours ago [-]
Does your and my tax return data fall into that same category? Individual health records from the Veterans' Administration? Earnings records from Social Security? Census information down to the individual household? Individual FAFSA (student aid) applications? Records of border crossings or even airline flights taken by individuals?
There's a ton of data the federal government has that I consider proper for them to have but for not every detail to be released in the valid interests of privacy.
If you believe the public has ownership and unfettered access rights over all categories of those data, I understand your argument that these voice recordings should be no different. That's an entirely self-consistent line of reasoning.
If you think that some of that data should not be freely accessible to any member of the public, then it's a valid question to ask "do these voice recordings fall on the private or public side of that line?"
_moof 20 hours ago [-]
> it's public domain data.
Are you sure about that? Just because it's now in the custody of the NTSB doesn't mean it's public domain. The NTSB didn't create it.
gnabgib 21 hours ago [-]
Not the title? US scrambles to stop Internet users re-creating dead pilots’ voices
I'm only an ardent viewer of crash investigation stuff, not a pro, but it seems to be a good way to show specifics of warning noises, engine sounds, unusual cabin noises (if relevant) and sometimes even structural failures happening over time in a more direct way from the cockpit voice recorder without sharing the actual "audio".
SR2Z 21 hours ago [-]
A distressed airplane makes a lot of noises which are very difficult for the human ear to pick out and identify. For example, multiple closely-spaced bangs or rumbling noises will appear distinctly on a spectrogram but will be very hard to hear.
bragr 21 hours ago [-]
Basically they were just trying to track down weird noises on the recording. They also went and recorded audio on a similar UPS MD-11 to try to identify the source. According to the NTSB:
"This high pitch ringing sound, primarily noted at approximately 6.35 kHz, occurred at 17:13:05.5 EST, shortly after the aircraft rotated for takeoff, and continued with varying amplitude throughout the remainder of the recording. Additionally, a tone at about 2.1 kHz was present along with the ringing that could not be identified."
sokoloff 22 hours ago [-]
Where else would they get sounds from inside the cockpit that weren’t transmitted on the radio?
mcoliver 18 hours ago [-]
Glad to see financial institutions use voice authentication. Absolutely nothing could go wrong with that.
madaxe_again 22 hours ago [-]
Next year: Congress bans the Fourier transform.
dmboyd 21 hours ago [-]
Don’t joke about that, you’ll give them ideas. particularly as Fourier is credited with discovering the greenhouse effect.
creationcomplex 19 hours ago [-]
Oh no, I read a book which credited the greenhouse effect to Von Humboldt years ago and have been misinforming people ever since
superkuh 22 hours ago [-]
Like Scott Manley says, going from a frequency domain image representation to a time domain sound file is something that is extremely old and does not and has not required AI the last 50 years. It's just that they vibe coded the extremely old, extremely normal algorithmic solution. AI did not recreate the dead pilots voice, it just made data preparation and coding a bit less work.
It's almost certain you've used software or seen/heard software output today that transformed between frequency domain and time domain. It's ubiquitous.
15155 22 hours ago [-]
FFTs are found in every nook and cranny of modern communications and computing.
It says in the article that the creator used OpenAI Codex, presumably because the spectrogram image wouldn’t have enough resolution by itself.
gnerd00 22 hours ago [-]
you are correct - I coded this in the late 1980s with digital sound domain experts
RevEng 22 hours ago [-]
A spectrogram is literally the same audio, just transformed through a Fourier transform. That transform has a trivial inverse. The spectrogram isn't perfect - the visual representation is low resolution and the phase information is missing - but it's plenty enough to at least figure out what was said. There's nothing surprising that this is possible, only disappointing that whoever published the article didn't realize it.
maxlin 22 hours ago [-]
Not everything is AI, they provided the spectogram. Even a trained eye can read one, especially if context is provided.
Jtsummers 22 hours ago [-]
> Even a trained eye can read one, especially if context is provided.
I'd hope a trained eye could read one, that's the point of the training.
akamaka 22 hours ago [-]
The article quotes the creator saying he used AI
maxlin 22 hours ago [-]
Having the title be what it is is like saying a note-taking app is AI-powered if you used Claude to create it.
These knee-jerk reactions, creating special case rules, really seem like a negative to me.
Just wait for a ban on posting dash cam or police body cam recordings.
The NTSB releases transcripts of cockpit voice recordings, just not the literal voices. This is a human consideration that doesn't affect the quality or transparency of the analysis.
This is different than a privacy vs liability conflict, where a recording isn't going to provide a safety benefit, it'll just move liability around, where there's far more controversy over publishing any analysis of the recording, or even creating one in the first place.
The NTSB should never have published the unredacted spectrograph, as it is effectively a raw sound recording.
You seem fairly sure that the public has a right to hear them and that view is not universal and I'm not even sure is a majority view.
A long time ago (before the infantilization of the American public) this was the default, majority rule. And it's still reflected as the default position in the US Code.
There's a ton of data the federal government has that I consider proper for them to have but for not every detail to be released in the valid interests of privacy.
If you believe the public has ownership and unfettered access rights over all categories of those data, I understand your argument that these voice recordings should be no different. That's an entirely self-consistent line of reasoning.
If you think that some of that data should not be freely accessible to any member of the public, then it's a valid question to ask "do these voice recordings fall on the private or public side of that line?"
Are you sure about that? Just because it's now in the custody of the NTSB doesn't mean it's public domain. The NTSB didn't create it.
Maybe Ars changed.. this one make no sense (they didn't pull a docket, they closed the whole docket system) https://www.ntsb.gov/pages/dockets-unavailable.aspx
"This high pitch ringing sound, primarily noted at approximately 6.35 kHz, occurred at 17:13:05.5 EST, shortly after the aircraft rotated for takeoff, and continued with varying amplitude throughout the remainder of the recording. Additionally, a tone at about 2.1 kHz was present along with the ringing that could not be identified."
It's almost certain you've used software or seen/heard software output today that transformed between frequency domain and time domain. It's ubiquitous.
Nothing extremely surprising though.
I'd hope a trained eye could read one, that's the point of the training.