In July, Design studio Seneda & Abrucio and Copenhagen type foundry Playtype released ShieldFont, an open-source typeface that feeds AI scrapers falsified text by substituting words. The font extends OpenType glyph substitution from individual ligatures to entire words, so the page reads normally in a browser while a scraper pulling the raw HTML collects grammatically correct but meaningless sentences. The creators describe the defense as “economic, not cryptographic: the aim is to turn cheap, indiscriminate scraping into slower, more complex, per-target work.”
ShieldFont is the latest scraping-obscuring typeface in a long line of glyph-substitution fonts, which exploit the gap between a page’s code and its rendering, including those created by TuringFonts and LayerX. These fonts, which render normally, are generally considered preferable to computer-vision-obscuring fonts like Ghost Font, which creates words out of thousands of moving dots, and Decoy Font, which hides messages in blurred letterforms behind sharp decoys. However, such fonts are always in an arms race with AI, which eventually solves them over time: ZXX, which camouflaged letters against 2013-era OCR and was called surveillance-proof, can now be read by computer vision models.
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