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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

#171

Post by therealpygon »

Reason077 wrote: post #95
SyneRyder wrote: post #24

Took me a long time to realise that "Written In Ghost Text" wasn't actually the text I was meant to be reading, and that was only the decoy message. I can barely read the actual message, and it's about as "readable" to me as the Magic Eye 3D pictures. Actually I think I have a headache from looking at it on a mobile screen. As a research idea it's cool though. But I do wonder if/when AI models will figure out how to…

> ”Took me a long time to realise that "Written In Ghost Text" wasn't actually the text I was meant to be reading, and that was only the decoy message.” Wait, what? Seriously? That’s the only text I can see. Am I an AI?

It seems highly resolution and scale dependent and seems to rely on the idea of a user being on a PC.

This is super useful; I’ve always wanted my information to be illegible when scaled…

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

#173

Post by coatmatter »

Hendrikto wrote: post #35
SyneRyder wrote: post #24

Took me a long time to realise that "Written In Ghost Text" wasn't actually the text I was meant to be reading, and that was only the decoy message. I can barely read the actual message, and it's about as "readable" to me as the Magic Eye 3D pictures. Actually I think I have a headache from looking at it on a mobile screen. As a research idea it's cool though. But I do wonder if/when AI models will figure out how to…

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.

On my mediocre laptop display, I had to set the brightness moderately, and take my glasses off to see the decoy text more easily (easier than squinting). Deleting the custom text also made it easier. The other tip someone posted about moving the window around also helps a lot. Moving further back from the display also helps.

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

#174

Post by Measter »

ludwik wrote: post #100
Zambyte wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suppose technically, it's not a font in the traditional sense of a TTF font file. But, Ghost Font is an experiment of a way to graphically communicate in writing in a format that AI cannot easily understand And this thread is seemingly full of people claiming AI can read it while simultaneously sharing that AI could not read the actual message, only the decoy as demonstrated in TFA.

> And this thread is seemingly full of people claiming AI can read it while simultaneously sharing that AI could not read the actual message, only the decoy as demonstrated in TFA. That’s 100% on the authors for failing to make the default main “hidden” text and the decoy easily distinguishable. The way this is set up is incredibly confusing.

There's also the element of actual humans being unable to read the intended message, and only seeing the decoy text.

It's a pretty crappy system if a portion of your intended audience can't even read it.

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

#175

Post by Measter »

bmicraft wrote: post #65
gunapologist99 wrote: post #63

The answers here seem to establish that some frontier models can read it sometimes, but only after tremendous compute. That still makes it (well, a future version) potentially useful as a captcha if we hate our users but hate AI more.

Every single on of those answers I've seen _says_ they did decode it, but each and every one of them only found the decoy message without even realizing it.

Which is probably a case of the human prompting the AI only being able to see the decoy message, so they think the AI was able to read it because it matches what they can see.

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

#176

Post by ninjalanternshk »

mlok wrote: post #170
Lerc wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took just two screenshots and applied some filters and got https://fingswotidun.com/images/GhostFont_2_samples.jpg https://fingswotidun.com/images/GhostFont_b_2_samples.jpg An AI would be able to take consecutive frames rather than hamfistedly pressing the screenshot button, then accumulate enough samples to clearly make out the text from a clip shorter than the time it would take for a human to read it.

"Written in ghost font" is the decoy message. Your filters got those words. The real message is "only a human can read this" and your filters didn't get these words. (But I think there should be a way to catch them)

That’s the only message I can see.

Am I… am I an AI?

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

#178

Post by radeeyate »

This is another writeup from quite a while of someone else doing it with ffmpeg and imagemagick. It goes over a lot of details on how it was done. A better writeup than this one in my opinion! I also think the end result is much more readable, but it is missing the static text in the background.

https://oliveratkinson.net/static-captcha/

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

#179

Post by picofarad »

solidasparagus wrote: post #20

When I gave Fable a screenshot it found the GHOST portion of GHOST FONT. Based on pixel density via some python code apparently - https://imgur.com/a/m3c801F

Hackernews is very good at finding the decoy message. This is as funny as thedailywtf posters who post "code snippets" to fix some other code snippet, and every single code snippet is wrong.

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

#180

Post by hedora »

SyneRyder wrote: post #24

Took me a long time to realise that "Written In Ghost Text" wasn't actually the text I was meant to be reading, and that was only the decoy message. I can barely read the actual message, and it's about as "readable" to me as the Magic Eye 3D pictures. Actually I think I have a headache from looking at it on a mobile screen. As a research idea it's cool though. But I do wonder if/when AI models will figure out how to…

Has anyone tried asking an LLM to write a program to decode the message?

I’m guessing it is a one-shot task. On the other hand, it’s illegible to a large percentage of humans.

I always thought that once computers got better at solving captchas than humans, they would go away.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

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