7 ms·
Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
- dana-s 2mo agoI 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.
- rpdillon 2mo ago> it's objective is to make it harder for AI companies to get such data, if it wastes their time, it's a win. That's only one half of the equation, though, isn't it? What if it makes it harder for legitimate users as well? It seems there's a balance to be struck.
- iwontberude 2mo ago[dead]
- pixl97 2mo agoKind of funny how you get downvoted for a rational take, but one that's not anti-ai. You'd ask that same person how much they like captchas and I'm sure they'd think their a terrible idea and they've ran into all kinds of issues with them.
- waffletower 2mo agoI don't foresee anti-AI fonts being widely adopted. I see them largely as the symbolic saber rattling of intellectual property trolls.
- KPGv2 2mo agoEvery AI font proponent I've seen has been a fanfiction writer who just doesn't like AI stealing their shit to use against them.
- dgellow 2mo agoActually, pretty sure it was an art performance
- wesleywt 2mo agoI don't think its necessary. When everything is AI slop, people most likely will revert to trusted sources.
- unethical_ban 2mo agoIs 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.
- esafak 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision
- unethical_ban 2mo agoI'm aware, and my comment isn't meant to be a challenge to anyone's sacred honor. I was observing a juxtaposition.
- hellojomp 2mo agoWe 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?
- mister_mort 2mo agoIt's like the old tale about the national park bin with the smartest bear / dumbest tourist crossover, except we're now comparing capabilities of the smartest AI with disabled humans.
- Xirdus 2mo agoIt already was a major issue in 2010 - home desktop-grade OCRs could easily beat an average grandma on reading heavily garbled text.
- no-name-here 2mo ago> in 2010 - home desktop-grade OCRs could easily beat an average grandma I’ve heard Tesseract OCR recommended, but even in 2026, no matter how I scan receipts or documents, the OCR output seems far worse than human reading?
- Xirdus 2mo agoWell, I used specialized software specifically for solving CAPTCHA on select few file sharing websites. My later experience with general purpose OCR software was just as awful as yours. But it's a product problem, not technology problem - you really don't need an advanced AI for it, you just need a good implementation of traditional shape-matching OCR that doesn't seem to exist anywhere for some reason.
- strangecasts 2mo agoI think the difficulty was specifically with CAPTCHA challenges, which had to be quick to generate but still legible - OCR on physical documents has to be robust to a different set of problems That said, what kind of errors are you getting? I think the main practical difference between Tesseract's LSTM-based OCR and newer VLM-based OCR like PaddleOCR [1] is (hopefully) getting to skip making heuristics for the layout of the document, but errors possibly compounding over multiple tokens - are you getting individual illegible words or having the documents smooshed together because the OCR can't parse the layout? [1] https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR
- piker 2mo agoThere 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 https://tritium.legal/blog/noroboto but others have proposed and done the same with ligatures.
- tbalsam 2mo agoThere was a story once about a boy with a wheelchair who needed a ramp to get into school, and the school made him use the loading dock ramp used for garbage and other things at the back. The school argued that it was an appropriate accommodation. Accessibility is not accessible if you need to go through extra steps to get it. Cerebrally, this as a solution makes sense. But if you know anyone with a vision or other impairment, gating it behind a request is not only cruel but gets within dangerous striking distance of an ADA lawsuit, for general applications. Maybe in the legal field or specific niche cases it's possible. But this would represent a major step backwards in the work we've done lowering barriers for a population whose only difficulty in accessing common resources is because they were born, or got sick, differently than anyone else.
- piker 2mo agoMy dad caught paralytic Polio at age 2 and has had limited mobility his entire life, so I'm familiar with that issue. Our internal, hypothetical use-case was between contracting parties who were looking to avoid terms escaping into the wild. This shouldn't show up in standard ToS or similar. There are already really good legal reasons for that.
- doctorpangloss 2mo agookay, i get that as a lawyer who wants to make money, every client is "heckin cute and valid." and you can hypothesize that this thing is something that clients want: "terms escaping into the wild," whatever that means - are you saying that you think copying and pasting an agreement into an LLM makes its contents escape into the wild, by some mechanism? Look, I understand, you don't have to explain to me the theory for how that happens, I know it already. Since I know your a smart guy, to some extent you care about that only because you imagine that clients do. But in reality, in the real world, every email you send is read by at least two people, every contract you sign has multiple parties, etc. You make some obfuscated thing or whatever, but eventually, someone has the real text of the document - it might be YOUR client, it might be the person you are negotiating with, and you rarely represent ALL the sides. You never own ALL the information and all the parties and IT systems in totality. Eventually someone will put the text into a chatbot. Or maybe they put a salient piece of the pre-final text, like some legal theory or merely a question, into the chatbot. So I see this font stuff, or watermarking stuff, or all this provenance and control stuff, as deeply illusory. It is the worst circlejerky kind of aesthetic experience making. When you mess with anti AI fonts you are trying to compete in the same business DocuSign is in, that is, in the business of selling holistic social experiences - a whole 7000 person company whose main competition is a fucking pen - but it's not like you're doing something creative. If you care about aesthetic experiences, write a short story! Are you getting it? The itch you are scratching with this weird thing, nobody wants.
- hartator 2mo agoIt also mostly don’t work.
- bawolff 2mo agoYeah, it seems like most of these would probably be easier for an AI to read than a human once you give even a tiny bit of training to the AI. there is a reason nobody uses text based captchas anymore.
- theblazehen 2mo agoEven just giving the image and "do image analysis to figure out what it says" to your LLM will get it done
- hk1337 2mo agoAnti-AI fonts seems like scrambled porn on cable back in the 1980s.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- condour75 2mo agoAre these even meant to be used though? It seems more like performance art.
- gruez 2mo agoWith this kinda of stuff it's hard to tell whether the person is doing it unironically, or knows it's "performative art". A while ago there was a trend of using a tool which imperceptibly perturbs an image in a way that supposedly breaks AI training on it. Of course, artists ate it up, despite the skepticism from AI researchers. Same with people setting up their sites to be "AI scraper traps", generating gibberish content. Probably also trivial to filter out, but people do it.
- pixl97 2mo agoThe problem with being dumb satirically is dumb people look up to you as a thought leader.
- yieldcrv 2mo agothere was this guy that was anti-bitcoin - or specifically against most arguments from enthusiasts - and people started looking up to him to validate their feelings and on news and podcasts he wound up correcting so many dumb arguments that he sounded pro-bitcoin and could never get to his own points "well, no, not like that, the difficulty algorithm...." "there are ways to use it with the power off" "well, no, the transaction fees supplant the block reward so ..."
- ffsm8 2mo ago"caveman speak" skill, need I say more? People aren't particularly bright. That's why the scientific method was developed to counteract our built-in tendency for... Unorthodox approaches
- Animats 2mo agoAgreed. There was a thing a few years ago for dazzle-painting your face to avoid face recognition. This just makes you stand out.
- fluoridation 2mo agoWouldn't a font that shuffled the codepoint-to-glyph assignments be more effective?
- CodesInChaos 2mo agoThat wouldn't make the decoy text look plausible to the AI.
- avazhi 2mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- yipinwong 2mo agoNot 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.
- jotux 2mo agoFound it awful to look at, tried to zoom out and everything on the page got larger. Seriously gross accessibility.
- dwrodri 2mo agoAccessibility is important, and I find that "Reader Mode" in most browsers is quite good. Everyone should have access to the tools to consume content. Did your browser not provide that functionality?
- yipinwong 2mo agobasically make it look hard to read for the majority for the sake of 1%? let those 1% use a diff tool view instead of 99% of us having to suffer. That website no-way is accessible for my 30 year old eyes.
- dombiscoff 2mo agoI think he just enjoys terminal styling, man.
- evnp 2mo agoThanks 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)
- kstenerud 2mo agoWhen you look at their live demo (https://shieldfont.org/demo/ https://shieldfont.org/demo/), it says: If you use a screen reader, custom font, or translator, please uncover the text before reading. They also actively block copying the text, telling you to "uncover" the text first. The uncover operation is VERY expensive. Anyone using assistive technologies or trying to copy "protected" text is SOL. Search engines will index the decoy. You'll get no traffic. Their solution is basically putting yourself in a black hole.
- evnp 2mo agoIsn't this the same sort of cost CloudFlare and anime catgirls are making us pay daily? Only enough to deter bots, or "a few seconds processing." I take your point that one extra click/interaction required for screen readers only is objectively more friction, but it's only by exploring these technologies instead of dismissing them that we'll arrive at UX solutions truly work for people of all stripes (and ideally, not for bots, scrapers, and the like). I think if you're applying a tool like this you already have very different priorities than fueling Google.
- kokanee 2mo agoI'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.
- Uberzi 2mo agoIt's simply that a font won't solve anything. That concept is worst than security by obscurity, as it causes more problem and add more constraints than what it solves... for a very limited time until AI bots are adjusted to decode those fonts properly.
- waterTanuki 2mo agohow can you make such a bold claim so early with 0 evidence? A successful (and much more realistic outcome) could be to make a font that is financially infeasible for LLMs to parse but easy for humans.
- SideQuark 2mo agoYeah, that worked really well for captchas. Now even simple models far surpass humans at recognition. So there’s plenty of evidence. Now provide evidence it’s technically possible to make any font “ that is financially infeasible for LLMs to parse but easy for humans.”
- psd1 2mo agoBroadly, by reasoning from general principles, and applying a confidence level. I suppose Uberzi has a confidence level in their claim, but it's tedious to hedge every damn thing.
- pixl97 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network Every half assed means of trying to confuse an AI is just a small bit of learning away from making the AI better than you. Worse when you have people with disabilities, which I seem to be this week, you just make doing things a pain in the ass. What I don't get is people like you think there is a solution to this. There is not. The harder you try you either exclude more actual humans or you align the AI closer to how people actually see.
- Varelion 2mo agoIs there evidence shieldfont doesn't work?
- gs17 2mo agoIt only works while it's rare. If it was more common, scrapers would switch to OCR or simply reverse the font so they can decode the ligatures. Their own whitepaper brings up a bigger issue: if it works, it poisons search engines as well.
- Varelion 2mo agoOCR is a more expensive option, right? I don't think these fonts need to stop ai from being trained; I think they just need to make it more expensive and difficult.
- gs17 2mo agoIt's slightly more expensive, but the cost would be worth it if this became common. It's not designed to be hard to OCR, it's designed to be hard to copy out of the source code, so it doesn't require a very advanced OCR system (and all the regions that would need OCR-ing are clearly marked).
- pixl97 2mo agoMore expensive and not worthwhile are two different things. Also when certain implementations become popular it's much more likely someone will write a very efficient kernel for decoding said text making it much less expensive than generic OCR. Also more expensive doesn't mean that something won't happen, only the dynamics of how it happens. For example if you put all your documents in images then some service might just sell the AI providers the text. That service may do underhanded things like bundle OCR in an app that does something else and use your phone to get the text out of these images all day.
- blehn 2mo agoThe irony of championing accessibility using low-contrast simulated VGA text...
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoAlso the notion that the sides of the pages flash as you scroll due to simulating that old Macintosh monochrome monitor dithering effect. My eyes.
- Narishma 2mo agoWhere do you see the low contrast?
- smohare 2mo agoThe linked article has a fairly light gray background with white text. I can read it, but the low contrast is just tiresome.
- nosioptar 2mo agoI hate low contrast more than most. Setting browser. display. use_document_colors or browser.display.document_color_use to 0 fixes things. It does break some stuff, like voting buttons on hn. Im happy with the tradeoff.
- greendestiny_re 2mo ago
- grim_io 2mo agoDRM for your eyes == garbage idea.
- palmotea 2mo ago> 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.
- danudey 2mo agoThe main argument against these fonts is that you are removing accessibility for humans permanently in exchange for removing accessibility for scrapers temporarily. It might raise the cost for some scrapers, to some degree, but it raises the cost to, effectively, infinity for anyone who needs to use a screen reader, a browser's 'reader' view, or any other assistive technology. Things like this just remind me of EA's Spore; it released with DRM so draconian that legitimate players were getting locked out of the game during the first week, while people who pirated the game had no problem whatsoever and were playing the game without issue even before its release. The legitimate users of the thing were the only ones punished by the technology designed to stop everyone but them. This is going to be the same thing; a website which AI will be able to read in short order but which assistive technologies will not be able to read ever.
- jimmaswell 2mo agoI also see no virtue in stopping an AI from reading something to begin with. If anything, I find it anti-social - hide your work from the machine trying to learn from it, taking nothing away from you in exchange for benefiting all of mankind?
- anax32 2mo agoLove that page styling.
- bradthebeaverfa 2mo agoThis 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.
- Ohentis 2mo agoWell of the fonts listed, 2 out of the 3 would also prevent any human from wanting to read it and the third becomes an ineffective counter measure if it's widely used.
- hyperadvanced 2mo agoFor real. It’s such a weak cop-out of an argument to lead with that I clicked out, never to read this blog again.
- phoghed 2mo agoI don’t understand how you think a font would block a bot from reading your blog in the first place? It’s not even going to render the damn website. If it decides to and detects your retarded font it could just change the font trivially. You’d have to fundamentally fuck up the html text content for it to work at all, and then all you’ll do is inconvenience real people that you’d be extremely lucky to have attracted to your blog in the first place.
- dombiscoff 2mo agoI think the line of reasoning that a method should provide as much accessibility as possible to not alienate real humans is a good one. You use 'have to' as if there aren't better solutions that could be invented, but such will only occur if we challenge the imperfect solutions we have now.
- yieldcrv 2mo agoI 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
- rappatic 2mo agoIronic that an article about bad fonts would use such an ugly, garish font
- tabarnacle 2mo agoShieldfont approaches the accessibility issue mentioned by not obfuscating text on screen readers.
- ares623 2mo agoLook at what they make us give.
- aussieguy1234 2mo agoIt's probably trivial for AI to work around this either now or in the near future. 1. Screenshot page 2. Parse with OCR Then train or do whatever else the font was trying to prevent...
- frollogaston 2mo agoIs the video on shieldfont.org AI-generated? It sounds like that voice again.
- kazinator 2mo agoI can tell right away that is stupid because one of the things I've used AI for was for deciphering someone's illegible handwriting, which it did amazingly. Once it figures out for you what is written, you can't unsee it, so you know it has to be right. Illegible fonts will only create accessibility problems for humans, even ones with normal vision, high literacy and no cognitive defects (dyslexia), while AI will blow right through the text. If this is done in electronic documents, where the AI won't even see the glyps becaue it's reading the underlying character codes, it's even stupider. I can't believe anyone would even try this (and then believe it is working without putting their hypotheses to the test).
- NetOpWibby 2mo agoWho's gonna be the one to bring back Flash?
- dombiscoff 2mo agoQuite frankly I don't understand why the cat and mouse argument here is meant to serve as a shutdown for anti-AI methods. Whole industries entirely exist in a cat and mouse state (cybersecurity, anti-cheat, etc) and no one in those industries imply that any solution is or can be a permanent dunk. If anything, the very fact that theres no permanent dunk is what leads to such industries developing a competitive service based industry to begin with. Why can't a theoretical anti-AI industry develop into the same thing? These fonts just seem like the infancy steps for such.
- psd1 2mo agoCybersecurity and KAC are not tractable to legislation because the attackers are already breaking the rules. AI labs are broadly within the law and would like to not become criminal organisations, because money laundering is expensive.
- fwlr 2mo ago>>We’re better off with the way the web is now Well, bad news, you aren’t going to get to keep that either. Whether for high-minded reasons like “the knowledge that everything you create will be fed into the slop machine so it can later be regurgitated without attribution is having a deleterious effect on the morale of some contributors”, or for incredibly mundane reasons like “lacking the resources to either serve or block the crawlers”, I fear the web you love is dying of ai with or without anti-ai fonts.
- julianfurchert 2mo ago[dead]
- spragl 2mo agoI dont think those fonts, linked to in the article, are going to make any significant difference. But I really like the creativity behind them.
- logseman 2mo ago> Like it or not, all publicly available information will inevitably become accessible to anyone and anything that has permission to access it. This is the baseline scenario people need to plan around. The entire point of the situation is that permission is not involved. They just do it. Meanwhile, if I do it to them, I am fined/sent to prison/executed. Until such a time that this baseline scenario of inequality is somehow remedied, there will be a motivation to stop them.
- charcircuit 2mo ago>accessibility tools will parse. Already, you've cut out many of the humans you're trying to reach. I figure less than 1% of the people you are trying to reach would be cut out by text that some screen readers read incorrectly.
- akramachamarei 2mo agoWell, yes, that's kinda the whole question of accessibility. The proportion of people who e.g. can't distinguish colors or use the stairs might be a rounding error in some populations. We still find it valuable to strive to serve them. Some of this has been expressed and thus calcified into regulations.
- pwdisswordfishq 2mo ago> I don't have anything against these specific examples [...]. This post is meant to critique the idea itself. I'm not trying to put-down anyone here! This is self-contradictory. Either you want to critique something or you do not. Make up your mind.
- simonh 2mo agoSo a rounding error of nerds, who themselves are a rounding error, will invest a lot of effort and trouble to use tech that makes their and their user's lives harder, and probably won't even work, to hide text that LLM big tech couldn't care less about anyway. Cool.
- wesleywt 2mo agoJust give up and don't even try. This is what I am getting from this post. There are already efforts to pollute musical data that seems effective.
- teekert 2mo agoMy agents act on my behalf, if you make it difficult for them I (or they) will get their info elsewhere. Will this split the internet? How long is this feasible? How long until any agent can work around any barrier, just at the expense of more energy?
- jeroenhd 2mo ago> Like it or not, all publicly available information will inevitably become accessible to anyone and anything that has permission to access it. This is the baseline scenario people need to plan around. And this will be the end of the internet as we had it, and as we have it right now. With no way to block AI scrapers and no hope of AI companies acting ethically, shutting down the free internet is the only end result. I'll remember these fun, bespoke attempts to stop AI from ruining the world once the internet is gone. That alone makes them worth existing for me.
- woodrowbarlow 2mo ago"become accessible to anyone that has permission to access it" is a nothing-burger sentence.
- yehat 2mo agoDude, first choose a normal font for your blog.... duh
- Alien1Being 2mo agoLitigation and legislation against Big AI may be the only things that work . We will probably have to wait Europe and China to do this since the US executive , legislative and legal systems have all been bought by Ames oligarchs .