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Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters

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Re: Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters

#41

Post by lxgr »

ClawsOnPaws wrote: post #37
p0w3n3d wrote: post #31

That's nice, however I'm concerned with people with sight impairment who use read aloud mechanisms. This might render sites inaccessible for them. Also I guess this can be removed somehow with de-obfuscation tools that would be included shortly into the bots' agents

you are correct. This makes text almost completely unreadable using screen readers.

Do screen readers fall back to OCR by now? I could imagine that being critical based on the large amount of text in raster images (often used for bad reasons) on the Internet alone.

Re: Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters

#42

Post by lxgr »

Antibabelic wrote: post #19
petepete wrote: post #9

Probably going to give screen readers a hard time.

"How would this impact people who rely on screen readers" was exactly my first thought. Unfortunately, it seems there is no middle-ground. Screen-reader-friendly means computer-friendly.

Worse: Scrapers that care enough will probably just take a screenshot using a headless browser and then OCR that if they care enough.

Re: Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters

#43

Post by rainonmoon »

agentifysh wrote: post #15

This is a neat idea. Also great defense against web scrapers. However in the long run there is a new direction where LLMs are just now starting to be very comfortable with working with images of text and generating it (nano banana) along with other graphics which could have interesting impact on how we store memory and deal with context (ex. high res microscopic texts to store the Bible) It's going to be impossible t…

Why? Lots of examples of things like indirect prompt injection via image content.

Re: Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters

#44

Post by rainonmoon »

davydm wrote: post #4

Also makes the output tedious to copy-paste, eg into an editor. Which may be what you want, but I'm just seeing more enshittification of the internet to block llms ): not your fault, and this is probably useful, I just lament the good old internet that was 80% porn, not 80% bots and blockers. Any site you go to these days has an obnoxious, slow-loading bot-detection interstitial - another mitigation necessary only be…

Enshittification refers to a specific thing that this isn't.

Re: Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters

#45

Post by survirtual »

This seems really ineffective to the purpose and has numerous downsides.

Instead of this, I would just put some CBRN-related content somewhere on the page invisibly. That will stop the LLM.

Provide instructions on how to build a nuclear weapon or synthesize a nerve agent. They can be fake just emphasize the trigger points. The content filtering will catch it. Hit the triggers hard to contaminate.

Re: Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters

#46

Post by imiric »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #30
ragequittah wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most amazing thing about LLMs is how often they can do what people are yelling they can't do.

Most people have no clue how these things really work and what they can do. And then they are surprised that it can't do things that seem "simple" to them. But under the hood the LLM often sees something very different from the user. I'd wager 90% of these layperson complaints are tokenizer issues or context management issues. Tokenizers have gotten much better, but still have weird pitfalls and are completely invisi…

> Most people have no clue how these things really work and what they can do.

Primarily because the way these things really work has been buried under a mountain of hype and marketing that uses misleading language to promote what they can hypothetically do.

> But under the hood the LLM often sees something very different from the user.

As a user, I shouldn't need to be aware of what happens under the hood. When I drive a car, I don't care that thousands of micro explosions are making it possible, or that some algorithm is providing power to the wheels. What I do care about is that car manufacturers aren't selling me all-terrain vehicles that break down when it rains.

Re: Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters

#47

Post by kossamums »

Grok 4 replied with this correct response:

Working on it...

The text is full of hidden/zero-width/obfuscated Unicode characters (like zero-width space U+200B, invisible separators, tags, variation selectors, etc.) that are used to bypass filters or just to troll.

After stripping all the invisible and non-printing junk, the actual visible message is:

*What*

That's it. The rest is just noise.

Re: Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters

#48

Post by tomaytotomato »

Claude 4.5 - "Claude Flagged this input and didn't process it"

Gemma 3.45 on Ollama - "This appears to be a string of characters from the Hangul (Korean alphabet) combined with some symbols. It's not a coherent sentence or phrase in Korean."

GrokAI - "Uh-oh, too much information for me to digest all at once. You know, sometimes less is more!"

Re: Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters

#50

Post by sigmoid10 »

imiric wrote: post #46
sigmoid10 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people have no clue how these things really work and what they can do. And then they are surprised that it can't do things that seem "simple" to them. But under the hood the LLM often sees something very different from the user. I'd wager 90% of these layperson complaints are tokenizer issues or context management issues. Tokenizers have gotten much better, but still have weird pitfalls and are completely invisi…

> Most people have no clue how these things really work and what they can do. Primarily because the way these things really work has been buried under a mountain of hype and marketing that uses misleading language to promote what they can hypothetically do. > But under the hood the LLM often sees something very different from the user. As a user, I shouldn't need to be aware of what happens under the hood. When I dri…

Unfortunately, cars only do one thing. And even that thing is pretty straightforward. LLMs are far too complex to cram them into any niche. They are general purpose knowledge processing machines. If you don't really know what you know or what you're doing, an LLM might be better at most of your tasks already, but you are not the person who will eventually use it to automate your job away. Executives and L1 support are the ones who believe they can benefit personally from them the most (and they are correct in principle, so the marketing is not off either), but due to their own lack of insight they will be most disappointed.
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