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Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

theregister.com

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Re: Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

#41

> In a new class of attack on AI systems, troublemakers can carry out these environmental indirect prompt injection attacks to hijack decision-making processes. I have a coworker who brags about intentionally cutting off Waymos and robocars when he sees them on the road. He is "anti-clanker" and views it as civil disobedience to rise up against "machines taking over." Some mornings he comes in all hyped up talking ab…

These drones have cameras, it's a matter of time before they "share" footage... basically becoming robo-cops, traffic edition - this might be of interest to your coworker.

Re: Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

#42

> In a new class of attack on AI systems, troublemakers can carry out these environmental indirect prompt injection attacks to hijack decision-making processes. I have a coworker who brags about intentionally cutting off Waymos and robocars when he sees them on the road. He is "anti-clanker" and views it as civil disobedience to rise up against "machines taking over." Some mornings he comes in all hyped up talking ab…

Just tell him that Waymo is now sharing videos of this behavior with auto insurance companies.

I don't know if they are or not. But why wouldn't they...

Re: Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

#43
post #25
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4-way stops are terrible in general. They train people to think "I stopped, now I can go", which is dangerous when someone confuses a normal stop for a 4-way stop. It also wastes a good bit of energy.

4 ways stops should be roundabouts, but the US is allergic to them for some reason.

Because retrofitting them properly requires emminent domain. The ones they shoehorn onto former four way stops are so useless. They are so tight you still have to face a stop sign vs being able to just seamlessly zipper merge in a proper larger circumference roundabout. When they have room to build out a proper roundabout they are usually OK but that is hard to do outside say new suburban construction due to lack of available land on the right of way.

Re: Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confidently wrong > Powered by Gemini, a multimodal large language model developed by Google, EMMA employs a unified, end-to-end trained model to generate future trajectories for autonomous vehicles directly from sensor data. Trained and fine-tuned specifically for autonomous driving, EMMA leverages Gemini’s extensive world knowledge to better understand complex scenarios on the road. https://waymo.com/blog/2…

You were confidently wrong for judging them to be confidently wrong > While EMMA shows great promise, we recognize several of its challenges. EMMA's current limitations in processing long-term video sequences restricts its ability to reason about real-time driving scenarios — long-term memory would be crucial in enabling EMMA to anticipate and respond in complex evolving situations... They're still in the process of…

  > They're still in the process of researching it
I should have taken more care to link a article, but I was trying you link something more clear.

But mind you, everything Waymo does is under research.

So let's look at something newer to see if it's been incorporated

  > We will unpack our holistic AI approach, centered around the Waymo Foundation Model, which powers a unified demonstrably safe AI ecosystem that, in turn, drives accelerated, continuous learning and improvement.

  > Driving VLM for complex semantic reasoning. This component of our foundation model uses rich camera data and is fine-tuned on Waymo’s driving data and tasks. Trained using Gemini, it leverages Gemini’s extensive world knowledge to better understand rare, novel, and complex semantic scenarios on the road.

  > Both encoders feed into Waymo’s World Decoder, which uses these inputs to predict other road users behaviors, produce high-definition maps, generate trajectories for the vehicle, and signals for trajectory validation. 
 
They also go on to explain model distillation. Read the whole thing, it's not long

https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/demonstrably-safe-ai-for-auto...

But you could also read the actual research paper... or any of their papers. All of them in the last year are focused on multimodality and a generalist model for a reason which I think is not hard do figure since they spell it out

Re: Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a legitimate movement in my eyes. I don’t participate, but I see it as valid. This is reminiscent of the Luddite movement - a badly misunderstood movement of folks who were trying to secure labor rights guarantees in the face of automation and new tools threatening to kill large swaths of the workforce.

The Luddites were employed by textile manufacturers and destroyed machines to get better bargaining power in labor negotiations. They weren't indiscriminately targeting automation, they targeted machines that directly affected their work.

Which makes the comparison of modern anti-AI proponents (like myself) and Luddites even more apt and accurate.

Re: Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

#46
post #25
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4-way stops are terrible in general. They train people to think "I stopped, now I can go", which is dangerous when someone confuses a normal stop for a 4-way stop. It also wastes a good bit of energy.

4 ways stops should be roundabouts, but the US is allergic to them for some reason.

Even rural Georgia has double roundabouts now. Not sure why people on the internet can't contain their glee at stating the US is "allergic" to them when the frequency of roundabouts has grown significantly in recent decades.

Re: Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

#47
post #17
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4-way stops are terrible in general. They train people to think "I stopped, now I can go", which is dangerous when someone confuses a normal stop for a 4-way stop. It also wastes a good bit of energy.

Weird, I was taught that I can only go after yielding to the right.

That isn’t the rule either, I guess parent made their point. The first person who stops goes next, right away only matters if their is ambiguity in who stopped first.

Re: Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

#48
post #25
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4-way stops are terrible in general. They train people to think "I stopped, now I can go", which is dangerous when someone confuses a normal stop for a 4-way stop. It also wastes a good bit of energy.

4 ways stops should be roundabouts, but the US is allergic to them for some reason.

A lot of legacy intersections don’t have space for round abouts even in cites that embrace them.

Re: Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a legitimate movement in my eyes. I don’t participate, but I see it as valid. This is reminiscent of the Luddite movement - a badly misunderstood movement of folks who were trying to secure labor rights guarantees in the face of automation and new tools threatening to kill large swaths of the workforce.

The Luddites were employed by textile manufacturers and destroyed machines to get better bargaining power in labor negotiations. They weren't indiscriminately targeting automation, they targeted machines that directly affected their work.

Destroying someone else's property is much more obviously criminal than cutting off someone else's car, which is not nice, but not destructive.

Re: Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a legitimate movement in my eyes. I don’t participate, but I see it as valid. This is reminiscent of the Luddite movement - a badly misunderstood movement of folks who were trying to secure labor rights guarantees in the face of automation and new tools threatening to kill large swaths of the workforce.

How does cutting off a Waymo help with any of that?

The feeling of dominance over machines may be saving that coworker the expense and hassle of another visit to a therapist.
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