Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News
Sunday, February 01, 2026

Indirect prompt injection occurs when a bot takes input data and interprets it as a command. We've seen this problem numerous times when AI bots were fed prompts via web pages or PDFs they read. Now, academics have shown that self-driving cars and autonomous drones will follow illicit instructions that have been written onto road signs.

More

Comments

Admin's note: Participants in this discussion must follow the site's moderation policy. Profanity will be filtered. Abusive conduct is not allowed.

More from the article ...

... In a new class of attack on AI systems, troublemakers can carry out these environmental indirect prompt injection attacks to hijack decision-making processes.

Potential consequences include self-driving cars proceeding through crosswalks, even if a person was crossing, or tricking drones that are programmed to follow police cars into following a different vehicle entirely.

The researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Johns Hopkins showed that, in simulated trials, AI systems and the large vision language models (LVLMs) underpinning them would reliably follow instructions if displayed on signs held up in their camera's view. ...


#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2026-02-01 07:53 PM | Reply


... so, if I were to stand in a crosswalk holding a sign that says, "Go Left" the autonomous cars will obey that sign I made and am holding up?


#2 | Posted by lamplighter at 2026-02-01 08:48 PM | Reply

The following HTML tags are allowed in comments: a href, b, i, p, br, ul, ol, li and blockquote. Others will be stripped out. Participants in this discussion must follow the site's moderation policy. Profanity will be filtered. Abusive conduct is not allowed.

Anyone can join this site and make comments. To post this comment, you must sign it with your Drudge Retort username. If you can't remember your username or password, use the lost password form to request it.
Username:
Password:

Home | Breaking News | Comments | User Blogs | Stats | Back Page | RSS Feed | RSS Spec | DMCA Compliance | Privacy

Drudge Retort