Decoy Font • Hacker News Board

Re: Decoy Font

#11

Post by voidnullvalue » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

I generated a skill.md that reads this trivially. What kind of testing are you doing prior to release?

https://gist.github.com/voidnullvalue/620607d3c1773f8e7d83fb...

Re: Decoy Font

#12

Post by cush » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

noman-land wrote: post #7

This seems like it would absolutely wreck the experience for people using screen readers.

It only works as a decoy when you give it to the LLM as an image. As html it appears like normal human friendly text, which is what screen readers use to interpret the text.

Re: Decoy Font

#13

Post by atarian » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

noman-land wrote: post #7

This seems like it would absolutely wreck the experience for people using screen readers.

How? AFAIK screen readers don’t do OCR.

Re: Decoy Font

#14

Post by shlewis » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

Not even AI. I think I can write PIL script that will fix the font to be read by any ocr software.

Re: Decoy Font

#15

Post by mrweasel » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

Admittedly I'm a bit salty about LLMs due to they constant attacks on our infrastructure, the damage their doing to peoples minds and the general lack of morals shown by the AI companies, but things like this is rather childish and not really a solution to anything.

Re: Decoy Font

#16

Post by hyperhello » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

How does it know HAPPY HUMAN translates to SORRY ROBOT? Is there a cycle in there or something?

Re: Decoy Font

#17

Post by kps » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

atarian wrote: post #13

noman-land wrote: post #7

This seems like it would absolutely wreck the experience for people using screen readers.

How? AFAIK screen readers don’t do OCR.

The assumption is that if you use this alone to try to convey information to a human, a human with a visual disability can't use it. If you also provide a text channel (e.g. `ALT="…"`) then the LLM can use that and doesn't need to read the confusing image.

Re: Decoy Font

#18

Post by ligarota » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

voidnullvalue wrote: post #11

I generated a skill.md that reads this trivially. What kind of testing are you doing prior to release? https://gist.github.com/voidnullvalue/620607d3c1773f8e7d83fb...

[dead]

Re: Decoy Font

#19

Post by ryant123 » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #9

Is it useful? No. Does it stop AI from reading it? Also no. But is it cool? Yes, it is very cool.

Yeah, it looks good

Re: Decoy Font

#20

Post by MinimalAction » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

Extremely cool. I'm sure they'll eventually be trained to read it, but it's nice until then to trick AI.

I'm mad at AI companies for stealing texts from the entire internet knowledge base and now privatizing those profits in some sense.