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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

#121

Post by GlacierFox »

jimmaswell wrote: post #77
danudey wrote: 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?

Is this bait? Wtf haha

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#122

Post by akramachamarei »

GlacierFox wrote: post #121
jimmaswell wrote: post #77

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?

Is this bait? Wtf haha

If the comment baited you, maybe it's because you're holding onto a popular but nonsensical belief system, and you're experiencing painful cognitive dissonance.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#123

Post by akramachamarei »

charcircuit wrote: post #120

>accessibility tools will parse. Already, you've cut out many of the humans you're trying to reach. I figure less than 1% of the people you are trying to reach would be cut out by text that some screen readers read incorrectly.

Well, yes, that's kinda the whole question of accessibility. The proportion of people who e.g. can't distinguish colors or use the stairs might be a rounding error in some populations. We still find it valuable to strive to serve them. Some of this has been expressed and thus calcified into regulations.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#124

Post by wesleywt »

satvikpendem wrote: post #92
r_lee wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's why one should advocate for open weight models.

A trillion dollar IPO buys a lot of politicians to make these illegal.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#125

Post by neuroticnews25 »

JodieBenitez wrote: post #97
jimmaswell wrote: post #77

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?

> taking nothing away from you Hosting is not free.

Marginal cost of serving a text document is ~0.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#126

Post by nottorp »

danudey wrote: post #76
palmotea wrote: post #68

> 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…

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…

And even if you don't use a screen reader, how about search? Reader mode? Saving for later?

Oh and lynx/links...

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#127

Post by SideQuark »

r_lee wrote: post #81
jimmaswell wrote: post #77

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?

So jealousy is the argument? If someone reads my work am I worse off? Why would I post it to the web? If someone indexes it so others can find it am I worse off? Should I complain they also make money helping others find it? If someone build on it in a way I did not do, never planned to do, and found really neat new tech from reading lots of works, why should I get so upset?

Seems oddly sour grapes.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#128

Post by pwdisswordfishq »

palmotea wrote: post #68

> 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 agree this stuff isn't encryption, which means it'll always be possible to circumvent the obfuscation, but it could raise the cost. Hopefully that can be done to the point where it's just not worth the bother.

Did it work for non-cryptographic DRM? (Broadcast flag, Macrovision, deliberately miswritten floppy sectors, port dongles, physical manual challenge-response...)

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#129

Post by pwdisswordfishq »

neuroticnews25 wrote: post #125
JodieBenitez wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> taking nothing away from you Hosting is not free.

Marginal cost of serving a text document is ~0.

Marginal cost of serving a text document repeatedly to hordes of reckless scrapers hiding behind residential proxies is ⋙0.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#130

Post by SideQuark »

evnp wrote: post #36

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 exact…

> I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

“Claude: make the scraper mimic a screen reader.”

And just like that, in 10 seconds, their site feeds my “screen reader” the real words.

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