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Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

blog.yaros.ae

11–20 of 174 posts

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#11

I don't foresee anti-AI fonts being widely adopted. I see them largely as the symbolic saber rattling of intellectual property trolls.

Every AI font proponent I've seen has been a fanfiction writer who just doesn't like AI stealing their shit to use against them.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#12

We are now in a weird middle ground where we want to write things OCR algorithms have trouble transcribing which also means we write things people with accessibility issues have trouble seeing. No child left behind?

It's like the old tale about the national park bin with the smartest bear / dumbest tourist crossover, except we're now comparing capabilities of the smartest AI with disabled humans.

It already was a major issue in 2010 - home desktop-grade OCRs could easily beat an average grandma on reading heavily garbled text.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#14
post #9

There could be benefits unlocked in legal documents by retaining a machine-readable version and distributing the obfuscated version with a legend at the top. We proposed one that said: "This document contains mitigations against review by automated systems. Recipients should ensure that they have read the contents on screen or in print. Recipients with bona fide vision impairments may be entitled to unmitigated docum…

There was a story once about a boy with a wheelchair who needed a ramp to get into school, and the school made him use the loading dock ramp used for garbage and other things at the back. The school argued that it was an appropriate accommodation.

Accessibility is not accessible if you need to go through extra steps to get it.

Cerebrally, this as a solution makes sense. But if you know anyone with a vision or other impairment, gating it behind a request is not only cruel but gets within dangerous striking distance of an ADA lawsuit, for general applications.

Maybe in the legal field or specific niche cases it's possible. But this would represent a major step backwards in the work we've done lowering barriers for a population whose only difficulty in accessing common resources is because they were born, or got sick, differently than anyone else.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#16
post #14
post #9

There could be benefits unlocked in legal documents by retaining a machine-readable version and distributing the obfuscated version with a legend at the top. We proposed one that said: "This document contains mitigations against review by automated systems. Recipients should ensure that they have read the contents on screen or in print. Recipients with bona fide vision impairments may be entitled to unmitigated docum…

There was a story once about a boy with a wheelchair who needed a ramp to get into school, and the school made him use the loading dock ramp used for garbage and other things at the back. The school argued that it was an appropriate accommodation. Accessibility is not accessible if you need to go through extra steps to get it. Cerebrally, this as a solution makes sense. But if you know anyone with a vision or other i…

My dad caught paralytic Polio at age 2 and has had limited mobility his entire life, so I'm familiar with that issue.

Our internal, hypothetical use-case was between contracting parties who were looking to avoid terms escaping into the wild. This shouldn't show up in standard ToS or similar. There are already really good legal reasons for that.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#19
post #9

There could be benefits unlocked in legal documents by retaining a machine-readable version and distributing the obfuscated version with a legend at the top. We proposed one that said: "This document contains mitigations against review by automated systems. Recipients should ensure that they have read the contents on screen or in print. Recipients with bona fide vision impairments may be entitled to unmitigated docum…

It is not sufficient to work against current AI. It needs to also work against AI that has been trained by a competent team aware of your mitigation. Or worse, a competent developer with no particular AI skills.

Otherwise, you are relying on obscurity, and will lose as soon as you become interesting enough to matter.

You will also break non-AI machine processing use cases. That isn't just accessibility, it is things like search.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#20
post #9

There could be benefits unlocked in legal documents by retaining a machine-readable version and distributing the obfuscated version with a legend at the top. We proposed one that said: "This document contains mitigations against review by automated systems. Recipients should ensure that they have read the contents on screen or in print. Recipients with bona fide vision impairments may be entitled to unmitigated docum…

You will surely not have a good time enforcing the terms of a legal document that explicitly spells out that it is intentionally obfuscated from the party it intends to bind.
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