Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
Fonts that scramble or obfuscate text to deter AI scraping are a fool's errand, argues a developer. The scrambled text is what screen readers parse, harming accessibility. Every new font becomes a benchmark for AI firms to break, and they will be sidestepped. The end result could be copy-protection systems that enable censorship and paywalls.
If a human can see the information, that means there _is_ a way the information can be parsed.
- 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.
- 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)
- condour75
Are these even meant to be used though? It seems more like performance art.
- blehn
The irony of championing accessibility using low-contrast simulated VGA text...
- kazinator
I 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).
- frollogaston
Is the video on shieldfont.org AI-generated? It sounds like that voice again.
- NetOpWibby
Who's gonna be the one to bring back Flash?
- hk1337
Anti-AI fonts seems like scrambled porn on cable back in the 1980s.