21–30 of 44 posts
This goes well beyond accessibility and bots. I guess the Reader mode, a basic web browser feature meant precisely to read articles, wasn't an expected use case either?
Would you be allowed to do this in some countries commercially because of accessibility laws?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s the correct text of the article, as far as I can tell. Though not the entirety of it. The author goes on to say that ChatGPT wasn’t able to parse out the underlying text. Part of the reason it might be useful is not because “no AI can ever read it” (because I’m sure a pentesting-focused Claude Code could get past almost any similar obfuscation), but rather that the completely automated and dumb scrapers steali…
I didn't use Claude Code. I just pasted it directly into the web interface and said "I can't read this, can you help?" and then I excerpted the result so you sighted folks didn't have to reread, you could just verify the content matched. So basically this person has put up a big "fuck you" sign to people like me... while at the same time not protecting their content from actual AI (if this technique actually caught o…
(He's broken mainstream browsers, too - ctrl+f doesn't work in the page.)
GPT 5.2 extracted the correct text, but it definitely struggled - 3m36s, and it had to write a script to do it, and it messed up some of the formatting. It actually found this thread, but rejected that as a solution in the CoT: "The search result gives a decoded excerpt, which seems correct, but I’d rather decode it myself using a font mapping."
I doubt it would be economic to decode unless significant numbers of people were doing this, but it is possible.
I have a dumb question: What if we put a simple password in front of every website that everyone knew, like "password". Upon click of login, the user agrees to the terms of service which exclude all automatic scraping. I know this is a dumb idea, but I would love to know exactly why.
Here's the problem, you're still going to get scraped and the LLM will understand it anyway. Maybe at best you'll get filtered out of the dataset b/c it's high perplexity text?
Do training scrapers really feed all their input through an LLM to decode it? That sounds expensive and most content probably doesn't need that. If they don't, then this method probably works to keep your stuff out of the training datasets.
Congratulations, I guess? I can't read your content. But ... The machines can't either, so ... great job! Although... Hmm! I just pasted it into Claude and got: When text content gets scraped from the web, and used for ever-increasing training data to improve. Copyright laws get broken, content gets addressively scraped, and even though you might have deleted your original work, it might must show up because it got c…
That's cool. Hopefully you never post any remotely interesting, because in my very human 2010's way of doing things, I cannot even select and copy some text to my personal notes. This goes well beyond accessibility and bots. I guess the Reader mode, a basic web browser feature meant precisely to read articles, wasn't an expected use case either?
(Or use any other OCR solution you like; I've got a prototype that takes a screenshot and runs it through tesseract.)
I can read it on safari, but not on firefox.