11 comments

  • condour7529 minutes ago
    Are these even meant to be used though? It seems more like performance art.
    • gruez7 minutes ago
      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 content. Probably also trivial to filter out, but people do it.
  • piker54 minutes ago
    There could be benefits unlocked in legal documents by retaining a machine-readable version and distributing the obfuscated version with a legend at the top. We proposed one that said:<p>&quot;This document contains mitigations against review by automated systems. Recipients should ensure that they have read the contents on screen or in print. Recipients with bona fide vision impairments may be entitled to unmitigated documents upon request.&quot;<p>In testing, obfuscating small portions of text slipped under the radar of most (then-)frontier LLMs.<p>We used a font that was rendered on the fly and reported faulty or fake Unicode mappings: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tritium.legal&#x2F;blog&#x2F;noroboto" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tritium.legal&#x2F;blog&#x2F;noroboto</a> but others have proposed and done the same with ligatures.
    • tbalsam44 minutes ago
      There was a story once about a boy with a wheelchair who needed a ramp to get into school, and the school made him use the loading dock ramp used for garbage and other things at the back. The school argued that it was an appropriate accommodation.<p>Accessibility is not accessible if you need to go through extra steps to get it.<p>Cerebrally, this as a solution makes sense. But if you know anyone with a vision or other impairment, gating it behind a request is not only cruel but gets within dangerous striking distance of an ADA lawsuit, for general applications.<p>Maybe in the legal field or specific niche cases it&#x27;s possible. But this would represent a major step backwards in the work we&#x27;ve done lowering barriers for a population whose only difficulty in accessing common resources is because they were born, or got sick, differently than anyone else.
      • stronglikedan27 minutes ago
        &gt; Accessibility is not accessible if you need to go through extra steps to get it.<p>That seems a bit entitled to me, especially in the story you shared. They had access to the school just like everyone else. Why does it have to be in the exact same spot? Surely they could be dropped off by the loading dock as easily as others could be dropped off out front, and maybe even moreso. Should the wheelchair accessible stall be the first stall in the bathroom so they don&#x27;t have to go through &quot;extra steps&quot; to get to it? As long as the ramp had the proper gradation to satisfy the ADA, I don&#x27;t see the problem.
        • shnock19 minutes ago
          &gt; They had access to the school just like everyone else<p>They literally did not. They had access to the school from a different entrance than everybody else. Specifically, one intended for cargo before people.
          • fluoridation15 minutes ago
            That&#x27;s a different sense of &quot;just like&quot;. Not &quot;in the same manner&quot;, but &quot;to the same extent&quot;.
          • binaryturtle12 minutes ago
            Would it have been different, if they had everyone take the cargo entrance?
      • piker38 minutes ago
        My dad caught paralytic Polio at age 2 and has had limited mobility his entire life, so I&#x27;m familiar with that issue.<p>Our internal, hypothetical use-case was between contracting parties who were looking to avoid terms escaping into the wild. This shouldn&#x27;t show up in standard ToS or similar. There are already really good legal reasons for that.
    • gizmo68631 minutes ago
      It is not sufficient to work against current AI. It needs to also work against AI that has been trained by a competent team aware of your mitigation. Or worse, a competent developer with no particular AI skills.<p>Otherwise, you are relying on obscurity, and will lose as soon as you become interesting enough to matter.<p>You will also break non-AI machine processing use cases. That isn&#x27;t just accessibility, it is things like search.
    • aleksejs29 minutes ago
      You will surely not have a good time enforcing the terms of a legal document that explicitly spells out that it is intentionally obfuscated from the party it intends to bind.
      • piker11 minutes ago
        No, that’s not at all what is going on here.
  • hartator53 minutes ago
    It also mostly don’t work.
    • bawolff34 minutes ago
      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.<p>there is a reason nobody uses text based captchas anymore.
  • fluoridation24 minutes ago
    Wouldn&#x27;t a font that shuffled the codepoint-to-glyph assignments be more effective?
  • hk133745 minutes ago
    Anti-AI fonts seems like scrambled porn on cable back in the 1980s.
  • avazhi10 minutes ago
    Not everything that annoys or inconveniences you is harmful, as if this needs to be said to an adult.
  • dana-s2 hours ago
    I believe the cat and rat game is already there, for multiple places, spam, captchas and now for AI content, yes, it&#x27;s objective is to make it harder for AI companies to get such data, if it wastes their time, it&#x27;s a win.
    • rpdillon1 hour ago
      &gt; it&#x27;s objective is to make it harder for AI companies to get such data, if it wastes their time, it&#x27;s a win.<p>That&#x27;s only one half of the equation, though, isn&#x27;t it? What if it makes it harder for legitimate users as well? It seems there&#x27;s a balance to be struck.
  • waffletower1 hour ago
    I don&#x27;t foresee anti-AI fonts being widely adopted. I see them largely as the symbolic saber rattling of intellectual property trolls.
    • dgellow42 minutes ago
      Actually, pretty sure it was an art performance
    • KPGv251 minutes ago
      Every AI font proponent I&#x27;ve seen has been a fanfiction writer who just doesn&#x27;t like AI stealing their shit to use against them.
  • unethical_ban1 hour ago
    Is it part of the joke that the site is intentionally over-pixelated while the author critiques readability? (edit: I don&#x27;t mind esoteric design and I play old games. I found it funny to see a blog with aesthetics that are not optimized for long reading to complain about the readability of fonts)<p>I don&#x27;t think any anti-AI font design is more than design-as-art statements against AI. If there is evidence of them being used exclusively for business and without accessible fonts aside them, I&#x27;m willing to be wrong.
    • esafak1 minute ago
      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Turbo_Vision" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Turbo_Vision</a>
  • hellojomp1 hour ago
    We are now in a weird middle ground where we want to write things OCR algorithms have trouble transcribing which also means we write things people with accessibility issues have trouble seeing. No child left behind?
    • mister_mort1 hour ago
      It&#x27;s like the old tale about the national park bin with the smartest bear &#x2F; dumbest tourist crossover, except we&#x27;re now comparing capabilities of the smartest AI with disabled humans.
      • Xirdus49 minutes ago
        It already was a major issue in 2010 - home desktop-grade OCRs could easily beat an average grandma on reading heavily garbled text.
        • no-name-here6 minutes ago
          &gt; <i>in 2010 - home desktop-grade OCRs could easily beat an average grandma</i><p>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?