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A string of protests has targeted tech billionaires in several West Coast cities but not the kind with large signs and marches. Instead, crosswalk speakers have been hacked with what appears to be satirical impressions of the billionaires. Casey Martin from KUOW in Seattle reports.
CASEY MARTIN, BYLINE: When you want to cross the street, you press a button. A little robotic voice tells you to wait, and then it says when it's safe to cross.
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AUTOMATED VOICE: Walk sign is on. Crossing Denny Way.
MARTIN: But last week in Seattle, at least five intersections played something like this.
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AI-GENERATED VOICE: (As Jeff Bezos) Hi, I'm Jeff Bezos. This crosswalk is sponsored by Amazon Prime with an important message. You know, please, please don't tax the rich. Otherwise, all the other billionaires will move to Florida, too.
MARTIN: That may sound like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, but tech experts say it's likely AI. According to the Seattle Department of Transportation, these crosswalk signals were hacked to play these messages. Seattle wasn't the only place this happened. In Silicon Valley, it was reported that some crosswalk signals played recordings that sounded like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla's Elon Musk. Amazon, Meta and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment. Ava Pakzad heard one of the recordings at a crosswalk in Seattle's University District.
AVA PAKZAD: It's really funny, I think.
MARTIN: JP Smith also heard a U District recording and said he agreed with the antibillionaire sentiment.
JP SMITH: I really appreciated it. I thought it was wonderful.
MARTIN: One of these signals is close to Amazon's headquarters, where many people who worked for the company didn't want to comment. But Maeceon Mace works at a restaurant close to Amazon HQ, and he's not a fan of the crosswalk prank.
MAECEON MACE: If our cross signs can be hacked, anything can be hacked.
MARTIN: It isn't clear who's responsible. Seattle's Department of Transportation didn't offer an explanation of who did this or how but said in a statement, it is working with the crosswalk button vendor to strengthen security. David Kohlbrenner, who co-directs the Security and Privacy Research Lab at the University of Washington says this probably wasn't very difficult to do.
DAVID KOHLBRENNER: They're not very secured. That's on purpose. They're usable by people out in the field, and so they don't want them to have a lot of complexity with interacting with them.
MARTIN: He says each crosswalk signal can be logged into with a phone app and Bluetooth. That makes it easy for the city to quickly fix a signal or update the audio at a specific crosswalk. All you need is the password to log in. He thinks what may have happened in this case is that the signals had the default password from the manufacturer, which is usually simple and easy to guess.
KOHLBRENNER: So if you don't change the initial password, then you would just be able to walk up, connect to the device and then upload a sound file that you would like.
MARTIN: In December, a similar thing happened when a construction road sign was hacked to display an anti-CEO message.
KOHLBRENNER: There's a lot of infrastructure that works like this, that is not designed for somebody malicious to come after it. And we rely on people being kind of reasonable citizens to not do that.
MARTIN: When it comes to the AI tech that likely made this stunt possible, Cecilia Aragon says it's also pretty simple. She researches AI-generated audio at the University of Washington.
CECILIA ARAGON: All they need to do is have recorded samples of this person's voice. So basically, anybody who's been recorded and is a semipublic figure is vulnerable to this type of fakery.
MARTIN: Aragon says it's called voice cloning. With just a few audio samples, AI can learn a person's speech patterns, accent, inflection, and then you can get it to say whatever you want.
ARAGON: So it's really kind of scary.
MARTIN: She says there aren't strong regulations yet on this kind of voice cloning. But in the short term, the lesson is update your passwords.
For NPR News, I'm Casey Martin in Seattle.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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