AI deepfakes of Musk, Zuckerberg hijack California crosswalks

Pedestrian crosswalks across several cities in Silicon Valley were disrupted over the weekend by unauthorised audio messages impersonating Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, prompting investigations by local authorities.

According to the BBC, the incidents, reported in Palo Alto, Redwood City, and Menlo Park, home to Meta’s headquarters, involved the replacement of standard pedestrian crossing instructions with satirical and often bizarre greetings mimicking the voices of the two prominent figures.

“You know, they say money can’t buy happiness and… I guess that’s true. God knows I’ve tried,” one message, impersonating the 53-year-old owner of SpaceX, reportedly said, welcoming pedestrians to Palo Alto, where Telsa operations are based.

Another Musk impersonation offered a Tesla Cybertruck to pedestrians who agreed to be his friend.

Meanwhile, a fake Zuckerberg message introduced himself as “The Zuck” and discussed integrating AI “into every facet of your conscious experience.”

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) confirmed that approximately 10 pedestrian crossings in Menlo Park and Palo Alto were affected.

Pedro Quintana, a spokesman for Caltrans, stated that the audio features on these crossings have been disabled, and the activation buttons have been deactivated, reverting the systems to a timer-based operation.

Although it is still unclear who created the messages or how they ended up being played from the crossings, officials in the affected areas said that engineers were investigating how the crossings were tampered with.

Neither tech billionaire has commented on the incident.

Furthermore, the city of Palo Alto reported that at least 12 crossings were affected in the downtown area.

Meghan Horrigan-Taylor, a spokeswoman for the city, indicated that the city was alerted to the malfunction on Saturday and believes the tampering occurred on Friday.

“City staff have disabled the audible feature until further repairs can be made,” she said. “Other traffic signals in the city were checked, and the impact is isolated.”

Local media also reported that several crossings in the Redwood City area were also hacked to sound like the two billionaires.