Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Actually, pretty sure it was an art performance

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.

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.