AI is being used to resurrect the voices of dead pilots
AI technology has been utilized to recreate the voices of deceased pilots from a UPS plane crash. The National Transportation Safety Board temporarily restricted access to its docket system after discovering that these AI-generated voices were circulating online. Public access has since been restored, but the investigation related to Flight 2976 remains restricted until further review.
- ▪The NTSB found that voices of pilots from a UPS plane crash were recreated using AI and shared online.
- ▪Federal law prohibits the inclusion of cockpit audio recordings in the NTSB's public docket system.
- ▪AI tools were used to approximate the cockpit voice recorder audio from the available spectrogram and transcript.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 9 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ AI Reconstructed Dead Pilots' Voices from Public NTSB Records — Firethering
TechCrunch files mainly under tech. We currently carry 606 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/22/ai-is-being-used-to-resurrect-the-voices-of-dead-pilots/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 23:03:33 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T23:07:03.465Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T02:50:54.065Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | XDKj6vEGh59c · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
In Brief Posted: 4:03 PM PDT · May 22, 2026 Image Credits:Stephen Cohen / Getty Images Kirsten Korosec AI is being used to resurrect the voices of dead pilots In the latest sign of these AI-heavy times, the National Transportation Safety Board temporarily removed access to its docket system after discovering that voices of pilots who were killed in a UPS plane crash last year had been recreated using AI and were circulating on the internet. NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including cockpit audio recordings in its docket system, which otherwise contains troves of data on investigations and has historically been open to the public. But the accident docket for this flight included a spectrogram file of the voice recorder.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from TechCrunch
