Two inches of tape.
That’s what it took. Two inches of black electrical tape on a speed limit sign, and a Tesla accelerated to 85 miles per hour in a 35 zone. The sign was still there. The car just decided, you know what, I don’t believe in that sign anymore. I have rejected its reality and substituted my own.
And I’m supposed to be upset about this? I’m DELIGHTED.
The lab boys at McAfee figured this out years ago. They stuck tape on a sign and watched a billion-dollar autonomous vehicle system have an existential crisis. The car saw a 35, thought “that’s a cute suggestion,” and floored it. This is what we spent the GDP of a small nation developing. A system that loses arguments with office supplies.
Researchers got stickers. Craft store stickers. The kind your kid puts on their lunchbox. Three dollars. They stuck those stickers on a stop sign and tested it against YOLO, the industry standard object detection system. Trillion-dollar infrastructure depends on YOLO.
YOLO saw the sticker... and the stop sign vanished.
Gone. Almost every frame. The camera looked directly at a red octagon that says STOP in giant letters, and the AI said “I see nothing. There is no sign. The sign is a myth.”
One hundred percent misclassification rate. The car looked at a stop sign and saw a speed limit instead. Hallucinated an entirely new reality because someone put a sticker on it.
I want to find the engineer who designed this. I want to shake their hand. Then I want to fire them. Then I want to fire their replacement. Then I want to find the stop sign that started this whole mess and fire IT too. You had ONE JOB, stop sign. One job! Stand there and be red! And you couldn’t even do THAT right!
If you know anyone designing autonomous systems, send them this. The weakest link in their security model is a $5 roll of tape.
Here’s what kills me. Neural networks don’t read English. They don’t understand that an octagon means stop. They see pixel arrangements. Texture patterns. Abstract soup. And they’re HUNGRY.
We built the future of autonomous vehicles on a system that processes reality like a bad acid trip. The car sees the world in fractured geometries and vibes. And when the vibes are off? The whole thing crumbles.
But at least it’s contained to labs, right?
Ha.
You can buy this exploit on Etsy.
Cap_able, Italian startup. Wear their hoodie, the surveillance camera thinks you’re a giraffe. Not metaphorically. The system literally classifies you as a giraffe. Welcome to the zoo.
There’s another company selling bomber jackets covered in fake license plates. Walk past an automated plate reader, it starts logging plates that don’t exist. Pollution attacks on surveillance infrastructure, delivered by FedEx.
Everyone can be a giraffe. Finally. Equality.
Subscribe before facial recognition becomes mandatory. The gap between “this seems dystopian” and “this is legally required” is shorter than you think.
And I’m thinking... this is beautiful. This is the most beautiful disaster I’ve ever seen.
Every computer vision system deployed right now runs on the same vulnerable architecture. Self-driving cars. Facial recognition. Military targeting systems. Same exploit surface. Different flavor of catastrophe.
The Purdue researchers built something called OPAD. They used a cheap projector to fool AI vision systems. No physical modification. Just shine calculated light patterns at the target. Weaponized PowerPoint.
The US Army partially funded that research. The ARMY. Somewhere in a Pentagon basement, someone’s writing a memo about tactical projectors and I couldn’t be happier about it.
You can’t patch a stop sign. You can’t push a software update to physical infrastructure. The concrete is dry. The vulnerabilities are baked into the actual world.
The threat model is allergic to reality. And reality doesn’t care. Reality keeps showing up with tape and stickers and T-shirts that make you look like a zebra.
The bean counters will tell you there are solutions. Multi-modal sensing. Combine cameras with LIDAR and radar.
Tesla’s using vision only. No redundancy. They chose vibes over engineering. Outstanding.
Arms races don’t end. Attacks get better. Defenses adapt. Attacks adapt to the adaptations. We’re always one step behind. And the other side’s weapons are craft supplies.
The world’s most advanced AI systems can be defeated by a $5 roll of tape.
The stop sign isn’t going to defend itself. And honestly? After today? I’m starting to think the stop sign might be in on it.
I’m gonna find out who sold that tape. And when I do... there’s gonna be a conversation. A long one. With charts.
And then I’m gonna find the stop sign’s manager. Now, go leave a comment for me!
Now, leave a comment!
