Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

sspeckx about 3 hours ago 33 commentsRead Article on blog.yaros.ae

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Discussion (33 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

evnp•1 minute ago

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. Two things we are still working on: JAWS is untested, and #7 tracks NVDA not announcing the unlock.

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)

Legend2440•3 minutes ago

I am skeptical of the whole idea. It is likely not possible to construct a font which is readable by humans but not learnable by AI.

Even if your font fools AI today, if you train it on a bunch of examples of the font (which will happen automatically if it sees any widespread use) it will quickly learn the real pattern.

yipinwong•2 minutes ago

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.

condour75•34 minutes ago

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

gruez•12 minutes ago

With 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.

piker•about 1 hour ago

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.

tbalsam•about 1 hour ago

There 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.

stronglikedan•32 minutes ago

> Accessibility is not accessible if you need to go through extra steps to get it.

That seems a bit entitled to me, especially in the story you shared. They had access to the school just like everyone else. Why does it have to be in the exact same spot? Surely they could be dropped off by the loading dock as easily as others could be dropped off out front, and maybe even moreso. Should the wheelchair accessible stall be the first stall in the bathroom so they don't have to go through "extra steps" to get to it? As long as the ramp had the proper gradation to satisfy the ADA, I don't see the problem.

shnock•24 minutes ago

> They had access to the school just like everyone else

They literally did not. They had access to the school from a different entrance than everybody else. Specifically, one intended for cargo before people.

piker•43 minutes ago

My 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.

gizmo686•36 minutes ago

It is not sufficient to work against current AI. It needs to also work against AI that has been trained by a competent team aware of your mitigation. Or worse, a competent developer with no particular AI skills.

Otherwise, you are relying on obscurity, and will lose as soon as you become interesting enough to matter.

You will also break non-AI machine processing use cases. That isn't just accessibility, it is things like search.

piker•16 minutes ago

Yep

aleksejs•34 minutes ago

You will surely not have a good time enforcing the terms of a legal document that explicitly spells out that it is intentionally obfuscated from the party it intends to bind.

piker•16 minutes ago

No, that’s not at all what is going on here.

hartator•about 1 hour ago

It also mostly don’t work.

bawolff•39 minutes ago

Yeah, 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.

fluoridation•29 minutes ago

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

CodesInChaos•less than a minute ago

That wouldn't make the decoy text look plausible to the AI.

hk1337•about 1 hour ago

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

dana-s•about 2 hours ago

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.

rpdillon•about 2 hours 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.

avazhi•15 minutes ago

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

waffletower•about 2 hours ago

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

dgellow•about 1 hour ago

Actually, pretty sure it was an art performance

KPGv2•about 1 hour ago

Every AI font proponent I've seen has been a fanfiction writer who just doesn't like AI stealing their shit to use against them.

unethical_ban•about 2 hours ago

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.

esafak•6 minutes ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

hellojomp•about 1 hour ago

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?

mister_mort•about 1 hour ago

It'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•about 1 hour ago

It 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•11 minutes 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?