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Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

blog.yaros.ae

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Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#31

Post by gruez »

condour75 wrote: post #21

Are these even meant to be used though? It seems more like performance art.

With this kinda of stuff it's hard to tell whether the person is doing it unironically, or knows it's "performative art". A while ago there was a trend of using a tool which imperceptibly perturbs an image in a way that supposedly breaks AI training on it. Of course, artists ate it up, despite the skepticism from AI researchers. Same with people setting up their sites to be "AI scraper traps", generating gibberish content. Probably also trivial to filter out, but people do it.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#32

Post by no-name-here »

Xirdus wrote: post #12
mister_mort wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> in 2010 - home desktop-grade OCRs could easily beat an average grandma

I’ve heard Tesseract OCR recommended, but even in 2026, no matter how I scan receipts or documents, the OCR output seems far worse than human reading?

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#33

Post by esafak »

unethical_ban wrote: post #4

Is it part of the joke that the site is intentionally over-pixelated while the author critiques readability? (edit: I don't mind esoteric design and I play old games. I found it funny to see a blog with aesthetics that are not optimized for long reading to complain about the readability of fonts) I don't think any anti-AI font design is more than design-as-art statements against AI. If there is evidence of them being…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#36

Post by evnp »

Thanks for introducing me to shieldfont.org! It's the first of these I've seen that feels designed to be more than a visual experiment, reading through their landing page is interesting. In particular, their section on accessibility seems to contradict this post's opening premise:

> Screen readers get the real words. A screen reader reading down the page is never handed scrambled text, and our NVDA test asserts exactly that. Screen review and touch exploration are untested. ShieldFont hides shielded passages from accessibility tools by default with aria-hidden="true", because a decoy read aloud is fluent, grammatical, wrong English, and that is worse than silence.

> The real words remain sealed in the same page, and a visible notice above the block carries the control that uncovers them. It is on by default and reachable by mouse, keyboard and screen reader alike. Pressing it sets the reader’s browser to solving a compute-heavy puzzle: JavaScript and a few seconds of processing, more than most mass scrapers are willing to spend. That puts the words within reach of a screen reader, a translator and copy/paste.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Also just aside, love this TUI-esque blog design and color palette (maybe a bearblog theme? still worth an upvote)

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#38

Post by unethical_ban »

esafak wrote: post #33
unethical_ban wrote: post #4

Is it part of the joke that the site is intentionally over-pixelated while the author critiques readability? (edit: I don't mind esoteric design and I play old games. I found it funny to see a blog with aesthetics that are not optimized for long reading to complain about the readability of fonts) I don't think any anti-AI font design is more than design-as-art statements against AI. If there is evidence of them being…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

I'm aware, and my comment isn't meant to be a challenge to anyone's sacred honor. I was observing a juxtaposition.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#39

Post by kokanee »

I'm a bit frustrated by what seems to be a widespread strong negative reaction to anti-AI fonts. The accessibility problem is real, but I feel like that's a reason to push the investigation deeper for solutions to that problem, not a reason to abandon the effort entirely. The largest intellectual property infringement in the history of the universe is actively unfolding, and it's resulting in an existentially threatening transfer of wealth and power. That's a problem worth exploring every solution for, and solving it may entail some serious sacrifices.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#40

Post by jotux »

yipinwong wrote: post #35

Not trynna to be funny. The author's post is anti-human, thus useless and harmful (medically). I can't read this bad font, sizing, spacing, etc. The main offender is the color choice, and fonts that are just god aweful to read.

Found it awful to look at, tried to zoom out and everything on the page got larger. Seriously gross accessibility.
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