The web’s newest weapon against AI scrapers is a font

“ShieldFont” aims to poison AI training data without making pages unreadable for people.

The short version

• AI companies’ penchant for scraping through large swathes of the public web in search of valuable training data has already led to lawsuits and technical fixes aimed at stopping the practice.
• Now, a pair of designers are hoping to stymie these scrapers with a new font designed to offer people a perfectly readable webpage while serving scrapers a subtly edited, nonsensical version in the underlying HTML.
• Simply replacing common words with synonyms or antonyms would be too easy for a smart scraper to reverse.

What happened

On the other end, replacing words with completely unrelated gibberish could lead to easier detection (and potentially circumvention) by a smart scraping filter. So ShieldFont replaces words with similar parts of speech that occupy a completely different informational context—swapping “horse” with “potato,” for instance.

Why it matters

The result is a scrapable sentence that looks semantically correct but has a completely altered meaning.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.