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.
> 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.
Kind 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.
Is it part of the joke that the site is intentionally over-pixelated while the author critiques readability?
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.
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?
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.
It already was a major issue in 2010 - home desktop-grade OCRs could easily beat an average grandma on reading heavily garbled text. That's one of the reasons ReCaptcha was invented, because traditional CAPTCHA stopped working.
Well, 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.
I 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?
>> no matter how I scan receipts or documents, the OCR output seems far worse than human
> what kind of errors are you getting?
Just noticeably worse character recognition, particularly where the document is faded, water-stained, or the paper document (not the scan) was low resolution to begin with, as compared to 'normal' human recognition.
I was largely using Tesseract in conjunction with the self-hosted Paperless-NGX, and I wanted to stay free/local without yet investing in AI-focused hardware. But you're right that AI will continue to advance, including in smaller local models, and it looks like Paperless 3.0 released recently (after my testing earlier in 2026), including with AI functionality.
> or having the documents smooshed together because the OCR can't parse the layout
I haven't even been worrying about that yet - I'm just at the point of trying to get the OCR characters right. :-)
We looked at this in legal and concluded that there could be benefits unlocked by simply retaining a machine-readable version but distributing the obfuscated version with a legend at the top. It 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 a lot of (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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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 ..."
"Go ahead, obfuscate your contribution to the repository of all human knowledge, see if that impedes our imminent our invasion! Moooahahahar!!!" - Kang and Kodos
Accessibility 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?
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)
When you look at their live 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.
Isn'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.
As soon as you need to put a "decode" button for accessibility functions to work, you're effectively posting the key along with the cipher. It's self-defeating because any tool that supports screen readers will also support scraping. It's a fool's errand.
I propose using the internet the way it was designed: Open and readable by everything (including bots). Scraping is a legal issue. There is no technical prevention mechanism that isn't theater.
A better technical solution imo is more P2P hosting -- say content addressing. Something designed to deal with the scrapers -- and maybe even make them bear infrastructure costs.
> Search engines will index the decoy. You'll get no traffic. Their solution is basically putting yourself in a black hole.
It's only search engines? And who uses those anymore anyway? Other bots?
It doesn't affect organic traffic, so you are not really putting yourself into a black hole. A lot of website are driven by social media and organic traffic, so they would be just fine with this approach.
Same thoughts. The black hole concerns are overstated for personal stuff when nothing is at stake. Planning to adopt one of the fonts and see how it goes.
It's funny, I was just thinking that the one thing I hate most about the terminal is that its monospaced fonts and overly-long lines are a nightmare for reading. So the fact that somebody designed a blog reading experience to mimic this is just… ugh for me.
But you seem to appreciate it, and I'm sure others do too. Different strokes for different folks.
I had no idea this was even posted on HN until a short while ago, lol
Regarding shieldfont, if a screen reader can get the real words, then AI scrapers will eventually be able to get them one way or the other... I stand by my points in the post. I guess I'd say if someone uses a lesser-known obfuscation technique that remains uncracked or unnoticed by the bots, then more power to them. But if and when everyone else catches on, it will become useless.
I am very proud of the theme, which originally started out as a bearblog theme but I think by now it's all been replaced with my own CSS. The light color theme consists of the Windows web colors, while the dark theme is modified from the CGA 16-color palette.
I appreciate the feedback from people in this thread. I realize the irony of the blog not necessarily conforming to the ideal of an accessible format, but it's all in plain text and shouldn't be too much trouble for any reader-mode or accessibility tool to parse... I was aware the dark theme needed some more contrast. I just tightened it up a bit by darkening the gray palette value.
Be proud of the theme. It emanates unflashy nostalgia to me, like a mysterious text-adventure game you discover as a kid. I'm all for putting weight in accessibility as a goal, but never as the all-over riding goal, and always with the greater purpose of the work in mind. It brings to mind an a11y evaluation a recent company I was a part of had done by a 3rd party, where one of the resulting "guidelines" was to darken borders around all our inputs and buttons for better contrast. These had the effect of decimating the visual texture and readability of each page, as you were caught up in a sea of near-black borders on light background. But the design team felt it was a worthy tradeoff, can't say no to accessibility. In other words, for a personal blog, I'd say do what brings you joy first and foremost. It's hard enough doing work you end up feeling proud of.
On shieldfont, I feel like many posts in this thread are glossing over the point that most scraping operations are operating at scale, and all we have to do is make a piece of content (or many pieces) too expensive to scrape _at that scale_. It's not really about whether AI scrapers could or could not mimic a screen reader well enough in an individual case.
So, require an expensive-enough computation to access the true text, similar to the anti-DDOS measures that gate many full webpages today (admittedly, I'm not well-versed in how these affect scrapers). As annoying as these pages may be - or extra button clicks to "reveal" true text to a screen reader - this seems like a very pro-human space to explore, since it's one mechanism that can affect bots greatly and us individual viewers relatively little.
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.
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.
OCR 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.
It'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).
More 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.
> 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.
The 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.
I 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?
That seems like an unfair equivalence. Lots of things you enjoy, including this very forum, benefit already wealthy private companies. That doesn't seem like it's a very good litmus test for whether something is overall a benefit to humanity.
I'm advocating for a litmus test that can't be easily abused, and I'm advocating against unfair equivalences. I also am not calling "overall a benefit to humanity" a metric, it's more of a conclusion we could arrive at by an application of relevant metrics.
> a conclusion we could arrive at by an application of relevant metrics.
That’s dangerous ground because of how you can arbitrarily change weights of different metrics. If the goal is the “overall benefit of humanity” then that’s what’s important not metrics of dubious worth.
Number of successful outcomes reported (e.g. with disabled students, cancer patients). Labor costs. Latency of services. Scientific discoveries found. Etc.
I'm not trying to discount the qualitative approach, but I think it's not impossibly hard to find metrics we can associate with "overall benefit to humanity" from a quantitative viewpoint.
> I think it's not impossibly hard to find metrics we can associate with "overall benefit to humanity" from a quantitative viewpoint.
One would hope for the slightly higher ambition of metrics that are causally connected to "overall benefit of humanity", settling for merely correlated has that unpleasant risk of the association breaking as you try to optimise.
Qualitative metrics are also metrics. You have to have a spectrum in order to weigh things against each other qualitatively, even if the spectrum is just a 2-point binary.
I feel like both viewpoints are valid ways of determining what you personally view as "good", and I don't want to take away from that diversity of opinion
So jealousy is the argument? If someone reads my work am I worse off? Why would I post it to the web? If someone indexes it so others can find it am I worse off? Should I complain they also make money helping others find it? If someone build on it in a way I did not do, never planned to do, and found really neat new tech from reading lots of works, why should I get so upset?
I don't think we should hold our relations to big corporations to the same moral standards we invented for interacting with people, like "don't be jelous" or "don't be petty", because corporations won't reciprocate. They banned my account, so fuck them, simple as.
That is the problem. I believe web is long overdue for a torrent like model where hosting is shared among all users (and ISPs instead of 'cloudflares').
If the comment baited you, maybe it's because you're holding onto a popular but nonsensical belief system, and you're experiencing painful cognitive dissonance.
It is not rude to point out that an insubstantial comment, which in particular falls foul of Hackernews guidelines, likely comes from a sublogical mental process. I regret my apparent failure to promote introspection or further inquiry into the issue, but I suppose the rockheadedness to which I reacted would prevent this anyway for the foreseeable future.
So scrapers are using those people as hostages. So let's have something like a HTML meta tag to link to an accessible version of a website and hard jail for using it for scraping.
It's not a technical issue, it's a social one, people behave differently given the same set of possibilities and incentives, and we can and should target those who fuck it up for everyone.
You can just as easily say that people using these fonts are the ones holding accessibility users hostage, since they are willingly choosing to use exclusionary tools.
I also don't like the fatalistic mindset, but I feel like we're better off trying to retaliate against the makers and operators of the bots, rather than getting into a technological arms race against the bots themselves. That is, the fight is one of policy, law, and morality, not of technology.
Because the effect of the technological measures is an arms race; presumably, universally so. It's a net negative. The article captures the principle in a nutshell.
> Because the effect of the technological measures is an arms race; presumably, universally so. It's a net negative. The article captures the principle in a nutshell.
It's not that simple. What you say may be true, but the reason arms races happen is the alternative is surrender and domination of you or your people. You can't unilaterally choose to not participate without accepting those consequences.
> 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.
Did it work for non-cryptographic DRM? (Broadcast flag, Macrovision, deliberately miswritten floppy sectors, port dongles, physical manual challenge-response...)
> Did it work for non-cryptographic DRM? (Broadcast flag, Macrovision, deliberately miswritten floppy sectors, port dongles, physical manual challenge-response...)
Yes?
Did those measures stop piracy completely? No. Did they raise the cost of piracy so there was less of it? Probably.
Well 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.
I 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.
I 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.
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
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 51.4 ms ] threadThat'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.
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.
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.
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?
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
>> no matter how I scan receipts or documents, the OCR output seems far worse than human
> what kind of errors are you getting?
Just noticeably worse character recognition, particularly where the document is faded, water-stained, or the paper document (not the scan) was low resolution to begin with, as compared to 'normal' human recognition.
I was largely using Tesseract in conjunction with the self-hosted Paperless-NGX, and I wanted to stay free/local without yet investing in AI-focused hardware. But you're right that AI will continue to advance, including in smaller local models, and it looks like Paperless 3.0 released recently (after my testing earlier in 2026), including with AI functionality.
> or having the documents smooshed together because the OCR can't parse the layout
I haven't even been worrying about that yet - I'm just at the point of trying to get the OCR characters right. :-)
"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 a lot of (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.
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.
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.
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.
there is a reason nobody uses text based captchas anymore.
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 ..."
People aren't particularly bright. That's why the scientific method was developed to counteract our built-in tendency for... Unorthodox approaches
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.
That website no-way is accessible for my 30 year old eyes.
> 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)
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.
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.
The problem is... it's a legal issue we cannot solve. America and China are large enough to not give a fuck about what everyone else wants.
It's only search engines? And who uses those anymore anyway? Other bots?
It doesn't affect organic traffic, so you are not really putting yourself into a black hole. A lot of website are driven by social media and organic traffic, so they would be just fine with this approach.
Not sure if that's due to ublock or one of the font settings in ff.
But you seem to appreciate it, and I'm sure others do too. Different strokes for different folks.
Their stance appears to be "[t]his is not an anti-AI font. AI is in our lives. We are actually a pro-consent font." (https://github.com/isaqueseneda/shieldfont/issues/2) Might be a bit more niche market.
“Claude: make the scraper mimic a screen reader.”
And just like that, in 10 seconds, their site feeds my “screen reader” the real words.
Regarding shieldfont, if a screen reader can get the real words, then AI scrapers will eventually be able to get them one way or the other... I stand by my points in the post. I guess I'd say if someone uses a lesser-known obfuscation technique that remains uncracked or unnoticed by the bots, then more power to them. But if and when everyone else catches on, it will become useless.
I am very proud of the theme, which originally started out as a bearblog theme but I think by now it's all been replaced with my own CSS. The light color theme consists of the Windows web colors, while the dark theme is modified from the CGA 16-color palette.
I appreciate the feedback from people in this thread. I realize the irony of the blog not necessarily conforming to the ideal of an accessible format, but it's all in plain text and shouldn't be too much trouble for any reader-mode or accessibility tool to parse... I was aware the dark theme needed some more contrast. I just tightened it up a bit by darkening the gray palette value.
On shieldfont, I feel like many posts in this thread are glossing over the point that most scraping operations are operating at scale, and all we have to do is make a piece of content (or many pieces) too expensive to scrape _at that scale_. It's not really about whether AI scrapers could or could not mimic a screen reader well enough in an individual case.
So, require an expensive-enough computation to access the true text, similar to the anti-DDOS measures that gate many full webpages today (admittedly, I'm not well-versed in how these affect scrapers). As annoying as these pages may be - or extra button clicks to "reveal" true text to a screen reader - this seems like a very pro-human space to explore, since it's one mechanism that can affect bots greatly and us individual viewers relatively little.
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.
Their own whitepaper brings up a bigger issue: if it works, it poisons search engines as well.
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.
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.
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.
By that metric a complete ban on LLM’s might be on the table, which I don’t think is something you’re advocating for here.
That’s dangerous ground because of how you can arbitrarily change weights of different metrics. If the goal is the “overall benefit of humanity” then that’s what’s important not metrics of dubious worth.
How do you propose to asses “overall benefit to humanity” with metrics?
I'm not trying to discount the qualitative approach, but I think it's not impossibly hard to find metrics we can associate with "overall benefit to humanity" from a quantitative viewpoint.
One would hope for the slightly higher ambition of metrics that are causally connected to "overall benefit of humanity", settling for merely correlated has that unpleasant risk of the association breaking as you try to optimise.
Seems oddly sour grapes.
Hosting is not free.
It's not a technical issue, it's a social one, people behave differently given the same set of possibilities and incentives, and we can and should target those who fuck it up for everyone.
It's not that simple. What you say may be true, but the reason arms races happen is the alternative is surrender and domination of you or your people. You can't unilaterally choose to not participate without accepting those consequences.
Did it work for non-cryptographic DRM? (Broadcast flag, Macrovision, deliberately miswritten floppy sectors, port dongles, physical manual challenge-response...)
Yes?
Did those measures stop piracy completely? No. Did they raise the cost of piracy so there was less of it? Probably.
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.
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.
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