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Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot

mixfont.com

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Re: Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot

#81
post #44
post #22

Claude Opus 4.8 can read it with a single prompt and no instructions on how to read it. https://ibb.co/WWMSXQkQ

Is the answer correct? I don't seem to see any demo video with "this is a ghost font" encoded

Nope! It's the decoy text.

Re: Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot

#82
> For example, it would be interesting to incorporate Ghost Font into CAPTCHA systems, as most systems are easily solved by AI today.

It seems to me like it should be easy enough to take Ghost Font, apply normal video compression techniques, and analyze the compressed signal to recover the visual outline of the letters, which you would then analyze with OCR (or an AI I guess ...). In other words, a novel CAPTCHA technique but not necessarily "fundamentally more difficult" than existing CAPTCHA techniques, once the cat-and-mouse game gets going.

Re: Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, for me it is exactly the opposite: I can read the actual text very easily, but the “Written in Ghost Text” is barely perceptible to the point I would have completely missed it, if it were not for the comment pointing it out here.

I've just tried it on my large desktop monitor (roughly 1440p, not HiDPI), and I now see "Ghost Font" extremely clearly and can't see the decoy at all. If I scale my browser window to 30% zoom, then I can just see the "Written In Ghost Text" decoy message again. My phone would have been zooming out the browser window, and making the dots even tinier, but the phone is HiDPI so it would have still preserved the dots. M…

Flipping my phone between portrait and landscape thereby changing image size is enough to determine which message is legible to me.

Re: Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot

#85
post #83

What is making it hard to read for so many people? My eyes aren't young or healthy, but it is as clear as day for me. Wonder with screens play are role.

For me it's astigmatism. I have fairly mild astigmatism and I can just barely read the text if I try very, very hard.

Re: Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot

#86
The hallucination of messages bothers me severely. Especially with AI being deployed to ancient, difficult problems like the Herculaneum scroll.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm talking about the "Written in Morse Code" example, fully hallucinated text. The AI agents seeing a decoy message isn't as bothersome to me.

Re: Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot

#87
See also: a "font" that only people high on drugs can read!

https://qri.org/blog/psycrypto-contest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD4nV0CMkBI

Of course, the psychedelic hidden message is reversible with some video processing techniques for everyone else to see. And calling it cryptography is a mis-use of the term. Still an interesting use of the effect.

I don't think "ghost font" will work as well as the author claims.

Re: Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot

#89
post #82

> For example, it would be interesting to incorporate Ghost Font into CAPTCHA systems, as most systems are easily solved by AI today. It seems to me like it should be easy enough to take Ghost Font, apply normal video compression techniques, and analyze the compressed signal to recover the visual outline of the letters, which you would then analyze with OCR (or an AI I guess ...). In other words, a novel CAPTCHA tech…

I.e. there’s an ffmpeg incantation out there to do it.
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