Silicon Valley crosswalks hacked to play fake AI voices of Musk and Zuckerberg

WTF?! A number of pedestrians in Silicon Valley got a surprise recently when crosswalks started to spout strange messages from what sounded like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. It turned out that the systems had been hacked and these were imitations of the billionaires' voices.

Videos taken at locations in Redwood City, Menlo Park and Palo Alto showed the voices being played when the crosswalk buttons were pressed.

One of the videos includes a voice that sounds very similar to Zuckerberg, identifying itself as "Zuck," proclaiming, "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."

"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," the voice says.

Another voice that sounded very similar to Musk said, "Okay, look, you don't know the level of depravity I would stoop to just for a crumb of approval." The voice also offers to give people a free Cybertruck if they become his friend.

Another Musk soundbite states, "You know, people keep saying cancer is bad, but have you tried being a cancer? It's f**king awesome."

It's unclear if the voices are recordings of (very good) impersonators or were created using AI, though the latter seems more likely as they have some small tell-tale signs of being artificially generated.

Palo Alto Online reports that crosswalks on 12 downtown intersections were affected by the tampering, which, according to City of Palo Alto spokesperson Meghan Horrigan-Taylor, may have occurred on Friday.

Horrigan-Taylor added that the signal operations of the crosswalks had not been affected, and that other traffic signals in the city had been checked to confirm that only the crosswalk voice recordings were impacted.

One local resident said the crosswalks were no longer playing the messages on Saturday morning. It remains unclear how many crosswalks outside of Palo Alto were affected or how they were hacked. Officials from Redwood City said on Saturday that they were working to investigate and resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

Musk has long been a divisive figure, a reputation that has been amplified since he took over as head of the department of government efficiency (DOGE).

DOGE has overseen the elimination of approximately 279,445 federal jobs across 27 agencies within a three-month span following Donald Trump's January 20 inauguration.

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, was found to be equally disliked by Republicans and Democrats in a poll earlier this year, despite the changes he introduced to Meta platforms seemingly to appease the Trump administration, including ending fact-checking and DEI programs.