Live data from Hacker News

Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

blog.yaros.ae

81–90 of 174 posts

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#81
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main argument against these fonts is that you are removing accessibility for humans permanently in exchange for removing accessibility for scrapers temporarily. It might raise the cost for some scrapers, to some degree, but it raises the cost to, effectively, infinity for anyone who needs to use a screen reader, a browser's 'reader' view, or any other assistive technology. Things like this just remind me of EA's…

I also see no virtue in stopping an AI from reading something to begin with. If anything, I find it anti-social - hide your work from the machine trying to learn from it, taking nothing away from you in exchange for benefiting all of mankind?

you mean benefit a private company training their AI model which they market to the public in order to get to their trillion dollar IPO?

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#83
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also see no virtue in stopping an AI from reading something to begin with. If anything, I find it anti-social - hide your work from the machine trying to learn from it, taking nothing away from you in exchange for benefiting all of mankind?

you mean benefit a private company training their AI model which they market to the public in order to get to their trillion dollar IPO?

That seems like an unfair equivalence. Lots of things you enjoy, including this very forum, benefit already wealthy private companies. That doesn't seem like it's a very good litmus test for whether something is overall a benefit to humanity.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as you need to put a "decode" button for accessibility functions to work, you're effectively posting the key along with the cipher. It's self-defeating because any tool that supports screen readers will also support scraping. It's a fool's errand.

Accessibility isn't optional, so what do you propose?

I propose using the internet the way it was designed: Open and readable by everything (including bots). Scraping is a legal issue. There is no technical prevention mechanism that isn't theater.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#88

This author greatly overestimates how much I care about accessibility. If I have to block a blind person from reading my blog to block an AI from training on it, I'll make that trade every time.

For real. It’s such a weak cop-out of an argument to lead with that I clicked out, never to read this blog again.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#90

This author greatly overestimates how much I care about accessibility. If I have to block a blind person from reading my blog to block an AI from training on it, I'll make that trade every time.

I don’t understand how you think a font would block a bot from reading your blog in the first place?

It’s not even going to render the damn website. If it decides to and detects your retarded font it could just change the font trivially. You’d have to fundamentally fuck up the html text content for it to work at all, and then all you’ll do is inconvenience real people that you’d be extremely lucky to have attracted to your blog in the first place.

Post reply on HN