Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

dana-s

I believe the cat and rat game is already there, for multiple places, spam, captchas and now for AI content, yes, it's objective is to make it harder for AI companies to get such data, if it wastes their time, it's a win.

waffletower

I don't foresee anti-AI fonts being widely adopted. I see them largely as the symbolic saber rattling of intellectual property trolls.

unethical_ban

Is it part of the joke that the site is intentionally over-pixelated while the author critiques readability? (edit: I don't mind esoteric design and I play old games. I found it funny to see a blog with aesthetics that are not optimized for long reading to complain about the readability of fonts) I don't think any anti-AI font design is more than design-as-art statements against AI. If there is evidence of them being used exclusively for business and without accessible fonts aside them, I'm willing to be wrong.

hellojomp

We are now in a weird middle ground where we want to write things OCR algorithms have trouble transcribing which also means we write things people with accessibility issues have trouble seeing. No child left behind?

piker

There could be benefits unlocked in legal documents by retaining a machine-readable version and distributing the obfuscated version with a legend at the top. We proposed one that said: "This document contains mitigations against review by automated systems. Recipients should ensure that they have read the contents on screen or in print. Recipients with bona fide vision impairments may be entitled to unmitigated documents upon request." In testing, obfuscating small portions of text slipped under the radar of most (then-)frontier LLMs. We used a font that was rendered on the fly and reported faulty or fake Unicode mappings: https://tritium.legal/blog/noroboto but others have proposed and done the same with ligatures.

hartator

It also mostly don’t work.

hk1337

Anti-AI fonts seems like scrambled porn on cable back in the 1980s.

condour75

Are these even meant to be used though? It seems more like performance art.

fluoridation

Wouldn't a font that shuffled the codepoint-to-glyph assignments be more effective?

avazhi

Not everything that annoys or inconveniences you is harmful, as if this needs to be said to an adult.

yipinwong

Not trynna to be funny. The author's post is anti-human, thus useless and harmful (medically). I can't read this bad font, sizing, spacing, etc. The main offender is the color choice, and fonts that are just god aweful to read.

evnp

Thanks for introducing me to shieldfont.org! It's the first of these I've seen that feels designed to be more than a visual experiment, reading through their landing page is interesting. In particular, their section on accessibility seems to contradict this post's opening premise: > Screen readers get the real words. A screen reader reading down the page is never handed scrambled text, and our NVDA test asserts exactly that. Screen review and touch exploration are untested. ShieldFont hides shielded passages from accessibility tools by default with aria-hidden="true", because a decoy read aloud is fluent, grammatical, wrong English, and that is worse than silence. > The real words remain sealed in the same page, and a visible notice above the block carries the control that uncovers them. It is on by default and reachable by mouse, keyboard and screen reader alike. Pressing it sets the reader’s browser to solving a compute-heavy puzzle: JavaScript and a few seconds of processing, more than most mass scrapers are willing to spend. That puts the words within reach of a screen reader, a translator and copy/paste. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Also just aside, love this TUI-esque blog design and color palette (maybe a bearblog theme? still worth an upvote)

kokanee

I'm a bit frustrated by what seems to be a widespread strong negative reaction to anti-AI fonts. The accessibility problem is real, but I feel like that's a reason to push the investigation deeper for solutions to that problem, not a reason to abandon the effort entirely. The largest intellectual property infringement in the history of the universe is actively unfolding, and it's resulting in an existentially threatening transfer of wealth and power. That's a problem worth exploring every solution for, and solving it may entail some serious sacrifices.

Varelion

Is there evidence shieldfont doesn't work?

blehn

The irony of championing accessibility using low-contrast simulated VGA text...

grim_io

DRM for your eyes == garbage idea.

palmotea

> The public posts and discussions being had about this subject are already informing AI companies on how to train their multimodal models to get around these obfuscations, most of which have already been broken. I'd argue every new font and tech demo is effectively a benchmark, daring AI firms come up with solutions to sidestep them. And they will be sidestepped, one way or another. If a human can see the information, that means there is a way the information can be parsed. "Ghost" fonts will become just another scraping obstacle with its own set of contingencies. 1. I don't like the sense of futility and powerlessness this advocates for. 2. I'm not sure it is so futile. I agree this stuff isn't encryption, which means it'll always be possible to circumvent the obfuscation, but it could raise the cost. Hopefully that can be done to the point where it's just not worth the bother. That could happen if: 1. There are so many schemes out there the catalog of circumventions gets unwieldy. 2. Doubly so if the schemes allow generation of new obfuscated fonts per site or per page. 3. Then you're forcing the scrapers to pay a greater tax to get your text: spin up a Chrome instance to OCR a screenshot, or spend some a buck or two or LLM credits to reverse engineer the page in order to scrape it.

anax32

Love that page styling.

bradthebeaverfa

This author greatly overestimates how much I care about accessibility. If I have to block a blind person from reading my blog to block an AI from training on it, I'll make that trade every time.

yieldcrv

I think this is an example of just catering to the gullible solely because the market exists without pondering anything about the individuals in the market like the "pink tax", which isn't a tax at all but just a premium on consumer gullibility as the consumer can purchase other products that do the same thing simply marketed in a different way playing into anti AI sentiment in a useless way fits the criteria