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Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

blog.yaros.ae

111–120 of 174 posts

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#111

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.

I think he just enjoys terminal styling, man.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#112
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you propose assessing "overall benefit of humanity" without metrics?

Qualitative assessment etc not just metrics. How do you propose to asses “overall benefit to humanity” with metrics?

Number of successful outcomes reported (e.g. with disabled students, cancer patients). Labor costs. Latency of services. Scientific discoveries found. Etc.

I'm not trying to discount the qualitative approach, but I think it's not impossibly hard to find metrics we can associate with "overall benefit to humanity" from a quantitative viewpoint.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#113

> The public posts and discussions being had about this subject are already informing AI companies on how to train their multimodal models to get around these obfuscations, most of which have already been broken. I'd argue every new font and tech demo is effectively a benchmark, daring AI firms come up with solutions to sidestep them. And they will be sidestepped, one way or another. If a human can see the informatio…

I also don't like the fatalistic mindset, but I feel like we're better off trying to retaliate against the makers and operators of the bots, rather than getting into a technological arms race against the bots themselves. That is, the fight is one of policy, law, and morality, not of technology.

Why not both? Better that than putting all eggs in one basket.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I think the difficulty was specifically with CAPTCHA challenges, which had to be quick to generate but still legible - OCR on physical documents has to be robust to a different set of problems That said, what kind of errors are you getting? I think the main practical difference between Tesseract's LSTM-based OCR and newer VLM-based OCR like PaddleOCR [1] is (hopefully) getting to skip making heuristics for the layout…

Good points.

>> no matter how I scan receipts or documents, the OCR output seems far worse than human

> what kind of errors are you getting?

Just noticeably worse character recognition, particularly where the document is faded, water-stained, or the paper document (not the scan) was low resolution to begin with, as compared to 'normal' human recognition.

I was largely using Tesseract in conjunction with the self-hosted Paperless-NGX, and I wanted to stay free/local without yet investing in AI-focused hardware. But you're right that AI will continue to advance, including in smaller local models, and it looks like Paperless 3.0 released recently (after my testing earlier in 2026), including with AI functionality.

> or having the documents smooshed together because the OCR can't parse the layout

I haven't even been worrying about that yet - I'm just at the point of trying to get the OCR characters right. :-)

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#115
>>We’re better off with the way the web is now

Well, bad news, you aren’t going to get to keep that either. Whether for high-minded reasons like “the knowledge that everything you create will be fed into the slop machine so it can later be regurgitated without attribution is having a deleterious effect on the morale of some contributors”, or for incredibly mundane reasons like “lacking the resources to either serve or block the crawlers”, I fear the web you love is dying of ai with or without anti-ai fonts.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#117
post #17

It also mostly don’t work.

Yeah, it seems like most of these would probably be easier for an AI to read than a human once you give even a tiny bit of training to the AI. there is a reason nobody uses text based captchas anymore.

Even just giving the image and "do image analysis to figure out what it says" to your LLM will get it done

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#119
> Like it or not, all publicly available information will inevitably become accessible to anyone and anything that has permission to access it. This is the baseline scenario people need to plan around.

The entire point of the situation is that permission is not involved. They just do it. Meanwhile, if I do it to them, I am fined/sent to prison/executed. Until such a time that this baseline scenario of inequality is somehow remedied, there will be a motivation to stop them.

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