Citizens from several Silicon Valley communities have been capturing videos of crosswalk buttons that appear to have been hacked in an unusual way. Rather than the usual messages warning about traffic safety, the buttons instead appear to play satirical messages from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg soundalikes.
One Zuckerberg-a-like infected crosswalk reportedly told would-be traffic crossers "it’s normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcefully insert AI into every facet of your conscious experience. And I just want to assure you, you don’t need to worry because there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop it."
Another, this time impersonating the vocal stylings of one Elon Musk, appears to say "Okay, look, you don't know the level of depravity I would stoop to just for a crumb of approval."
It's unclear if the messages have been created by AI voice generation, or whether actual impersonators have been employed to record the satirical messages. Regardless, local news outlet Palo Alto Online (via Tom's Hardware) reports that city employees have identified 12 downtown intersections that appear to have been tampered with, and have disabled the voice announcement feature until "repairs can be made."
In Menlo Park, the location of Meta's global headquarters, another crosswalk button played a message from someone identifying themselves as "Zuck", who goes on to say:
"I just wanted to tell you how very proud I am of everything we've been building together. From undermining democracy to cooking our grandparents' brains with AI slop, to making the world less safe for trans people, nobody does it better than us. And I think that's pretty neat."
A local resident reports that some of the impacted buttons were no longer playing the messages on Saturday morning. Officials from Menlo Park and Redwood City have also confirmed they are aware of the hacks, and are working on a fix.
City of Palo Alto spokesperson Meghan Horrigan Taylor told Palo Alto Online: "Other traffic signals in the city were checked and the impact is isolated. Signal operations are otherwise unaffected, and motorists are reminded to always exercise caution around pedestrians."
For now, it appears no hacking group has claimed responsibility for the amus… I mean, public-safety-endangering messages, nor is it clear how each of the traffic signals were compromised. Still, it seems to have given several video-submitting residents a chuckle, and city officials something of a puzzle to solve over the weekend.
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