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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

#91

Post by atonse »

lawlessone wrote: post #89
atonse wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if this is a joke app or seriously some snake oil (like AI detectors). Isn't it trivially easy to just detect these unicode characters and filter them out? This is the sort of thing a junior programmer can probably do during an interview.

>This is the sort of thing a junior programmer can probably do during an interview. How would you do it? , 15 minutes to reply, no google, no stackoverflow.

Let me clarify, when I perform interviews, I tell my candidates they can do _everything_ you would do in a normal job, including using AI and googling for answers.

But just to humor you (since I did make that strong statement), without googling or checking anything, I would start with basic regular expression ranges (^[A-za-z\s\.\-*]) etc and do a find-replace on that until things looked coherent without too much loss of words/text.

But the problem isn't me, is it? It's the AI companies and their crawlers, that can trivially be changed to get around this. At the end of the day, they have access to all the data to know exactly which unicode sequences are used in words, etc.

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

#93

Post by lawlessone »

atonse wrote: post #91
lawlessone wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is the sort of thing a junior programmer can probably do during an interview. How would you do it? , 15 minutes to reply, no google, no stackoverflow.

Let me clarify, when I perform interviews, I tell my candidates they can do _everything_ you would do in a normal job, including using AI and googling for answers. But just to humor you (since I did make that strong statement), without googling or checking anything, I would start with basic regular expression ranges (^[A-za-z\s\.\-*]) etc and do a find-replace on that until things looked coherent without too much los…

ah i hadn't thought of regex.

true.

It does put the AI companies in the position though of continuing to build/code software that circumvents their attempts to steal content though.

Which might be looked upon unfavorably whenever dragged to court.

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

#94

Post by dragonwriter »

not2b wrote: post #92

Cute. But please don't use this, because in addition to making your text useless for LLMs it makes it useless for blind and vision impaired people who depend on screen readers.

And, conversely, it (presumably) has no effect on VLMs using captive browsers and screenshotting to read webpages.

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

#95

Post by wdpatti »

kenforthewin wrote: post #75

It's fascinating to see the evolution of HN sentiment towards LLMs in real time. Just a few months ago, projects like these were a dime a dozen and every AI-related post had a skeptical comment at the top. Now I'm almost surprised to see a project like this hit the front page. I don't have any particular opinion about this project itself, I'm sure there are legitimate use cases for wanting to trick LLMs or obfuscate…

I actually made this back in August but never posted it until now.

I agree with your point; many of the comments say that simple regex filtering can solve it, but they seem to ignore that it would break many languages that rely on these characters for things like accent marks.

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

#97

Post by atonse »

lawlessone wrote: post #93
atonse wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me clarify, when I perform interviews, I tell my candidates they can do _everything_ you would do in a normal job, including using AI and googling for answers. But just to humor you (since I did make that strong statement), without googling or checking anything, I would start with basic regular expression ranges (^[A-za-z\s\.\-*]) etc and do a find-replace on that until things looked coherent without too much los…

ah i hadn't thought of regex. true. It does put the AI companies in the position though of continuing to build/code software that circumvents their attempts to steal content though. Which might be looked upon unfavorably whenever dragged to court.

Good point. Then it's actually an active attempt, right?

Also I realized my statement was a bit harsh, I know someone probably worked hard on this, but I just feel it's easily circumvented, as opposed to some of the watermarks in images (like Google's, which they really should open source)

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

#98

Post by [deleted] »

lxgr wrote: post #41
ClawsOnPaws wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

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

It can. At the end of the day, it can be processed and corrected. The issue kinda sucks, because there is apparently a lot built on top of it, but there are days I think we should raze it all to the ground and only allow minimal ascii. No invisible chars beyond \r\n, no emojis, no zero width stuff ( and whatever else unicode cooked up lately ).

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

#100

Post by rolph »

atonse wrote: post #87
z3dd wrote: post #12

Tried with Gemini 2.5 flash, query: > What does this mean: "t⁣ ⁤⁢⁤⁤⁣ ⁣ ⁣⁤⁤ ⁡ ⁢ ⁢⁣⁡ ⁢ ⁢⁣ ⁢ ⁤ ⁤ ⁢ ⁣⁡⁡ ⁤ ⁣ ⁢ ⁡ ⁤ ⁢⁤ ⁡ ⁢⁣ ⁡ ⁤⁡ ⁣ ⁢⁤⁡ ⁡ ⁤⁢ ⁡ ⁢⁤ ⁡⁣ ⁤ ⁣⁤ ⁡⁡ ⁤ ⁡ ⁡ ⁤⁣ ⁤ ⁢⁤⁤ ⁤⁢⁣⁢⁢⁢ ⁡е⁣ ⁢⁣⁣ ⁢ ⁡⁢ ⁡ ⁡⁢⁢ ⁢ ⁤ ⁤ ⁤ ⁡⁡⁣ ⁤ ⁡ ⁣ ⁡ ⁡ ⁢ ⁢⁡⁣ ⁤ ⁢⁤ ⁣⁤⁡ ⁤ ⁢⁢⁤ ⁣⁢⁣⁤ ⁡⁡ ⁢⁢⁤ ⁤⁡⁤ ⁤ ⁡⁡⁡⁡ ⁡⁣ ⁤ ⁣⁡ ⁤ ⁣ ⁡ ⁤⁡⁤ ⁣ ⁣⁢ ⁣⁢ ⁤⁣⁡ ⁤⁡⁡⁤ ⁡ ⁡ ⁤⁣ ⁣⁡⁡⁡⁤⁡⁤ ⁤ ⁤ s ⁤ ⁣⁣⁤⁣ ⁡⁤⁢⁣ ⁡⁡ ⁢⁤⁣ ⁣ ⁢⁢⁣⁤ ⁤ ⁣⁡⁣⁤⁡⁢ ⁡ ⁤ ⁢⁤ ⁢ ⁢⁣ ⁤ ⁤⁣ ⁢⁤ ⁡ ⁡ ⁡ ⁡ ⁡ ⁤ ⁡⁤ ⁣ ⁡ ⁢ ⁡⁢⁢⁢ ⁡⁡⁣ ⁢⁣ ⁡⁢⁤⁢⁢ ⁢⁣⁡ ⁣⁣ ⁢ ⁣ ⁣⁡…

I can't tell if this is a joke app or seriously some snake oil (like AI detectors). Isn't it trivially easy to just detect these unicode characters and filter them out? This is the sort of thing a junior programmer can probably do during an interview.

its trivially easy, to finalize your encryption with a substitution of unicode chars for the crypted string characters.

if the "non ascii" characters were to be filtered out, you would destroy the message and be left with the salts.

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