Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

blog.yaros.ae

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 174 posts

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#61

Post by pixl97 »

gruez wrote: post #31
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 co…

The problem with being dumb satirically is dumb people look up to you as a thought leader.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#62

Post by pixl97 »

Varelion wrote: post #54
gs17 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only works while it's rare. If it was more common, scrapers would switch to OCR or simply reverse the font so they can decode the ligatures. Their own whitepaper brings up a bigger issue: if it works, it poisons search engines as well.

OCR is a more expensive option, right? I don't think these fonts need to stop ai from being trained; I think they just need to make it more expensive and difficult.

More expensive and not worthwhile are two different things. Also when certain implementations become popular it's much more likely someone will write a very efficient kernel for decoding said text making it much less expensive than generic OCR.

Also more expensive doesn't mean that something won't happen, only the dynamics of how it happens. For example if you put all your documents in images then some service might just sell the AI providers the text. That service may do underhanded things like bundle OCR in an app that does something else and use your phone to get the text out of these images all day.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#63

Post by pixl97 »

rpdillon wrote: post #5
dana-s wrote: post #2

I believe the cat and rat game is already there, for multiple places, spam, captchas and now for AI content, yes, it's objective is to make it harder for AI companies to get such data, if it wastes their time, it's a win.

> it's objective is to make it harder for AI companies to get such data, if it wastes their time, it's a win. That's only one half of the equation, though, isn't it? What if it makes it harder for legitimate users as well? It seems there's a balance to be struck.

Kind of funny how you get downvoted for a rational take, but one that's not anti-ai.

You'd ask that same person how much they like captchas and I'm sure they'd think their a terrible idea and they've ran into all kinds of issues with them.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#64

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

kstenerud wrote: post #58
evnp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the same sort of cost CloudFlare and anime catgirls are making us pay daily? Only enough to deter bots, or "a few seconds processing." I take your point that one extra click/interaction required for screen readers only is objectively more friction, but it's only by exploring these technologies instead of dismissing them that we'll arrive at UX solutions truly work for people of all stripes (and ideally, no…

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?

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#65

Post by ffsm8 »

condour75 wrote: post #21

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

"caveman speak" skill, need I say more?

People aren't particularly bright. That's why the scientific method was developed to counteract our built-in tendency for... Unorthodox approaches

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#66

Post by pixl97 »

kokanee wrote: post #39

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 threate…

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

Every half assed means of trying to confuse an AI is just a small bit of learning away from making the AI better than you.

Worse when you have people with disabilities, which I seem to be this week, you just make doing things a pain in the ass.

What I don't get is people like you think there is a solution to this. There is not. The harder you try you either exclude more actual humans or you align the AI closer to how people actually see.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#67

Post by 317070 »

kstenerud wrote: post #52
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…

When you look at their live demo ( https://shieldfont.org/demo/ ), it says: If you use a screen reader, custom font, or translator, please uncover the text before reading. They also actively block copying the text, telling you to "uncover" the text first. The uncover operation is VERY expensive. Anyone using assistive technologies or trying to copy "protected" text is SOL. Search engines will index the decoy. You'll…

> Search engines will index the decoy. You'll get no traffic. Their solution is basically putting yourself in a black hole.

It's only search engines? And who uses those anymore anyway? Other bots?

It doesn't affect organic traffic, so you are not really putting yourself into a black hole. A lot of website are driven by social media and organic traffic, so they would be just fine with this approach.

Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

#68

Post by palmotea »

> 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 information, that means there is a way the information can be parsed. "Ghost" fonts will become just another scraping obstacle with its own set of contingencies.

1. I don't like the sense of futility and powerlessness this advocates for.

2. I'm not sure it is so futile. 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.

That could happen if:

1. There are so many schemes out there the catalog of circumventions gets unwieldy.

2. Doubly so if the schemes allow generation of new obfuscated fonts per site or per page.

3. Then you're forcing the scrapers to pay a greater tax to get your text: spin up a Chrome instance to OCR a screenshot, or spend some a buck or two or LLM credits to reverse engineer the page in order to scrape it.

Post reply on HN