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SoulsOnly.tff – A font for humans not AI and keyboard firmware to type in it

41 points by billtarbell 4 hours ago | 19 comments

blahgeek 2 hours ago

Reminds me of an anti-crawl mechanism I encountered some time ago in a financial data provider's website: for all numbers in the table, a special font is used where 0~9 are randomly rendered as different chars (e.g. '0' is rendered as 5, '1' is rendered as 8, etc.). The backend server returns the "encoded" chars, and is then correctly "decoded" by the font. The font changes after each reload. So humans always see the correct numbers, but when some crawler uses the HTML source, the numbers are incorrect.

rao-v 59 minutes ago

How would a human copying/pasting a number work?

rpastuszak 37 minutes ago

In my experience (PDF contract sent by a house seller), copy paste was broken.

That said, after 15 minutes of gently massaging the PDF with claude, it was pretty easy to drop the substitutions and restore the original text.

billtarbell 4 hours ago

Everyone rushing to make their content AI-friendly made me want to figure out how to make content AI-unfriendly. Basically human-written words meant for human eyes only.

So I built "SoulsOnly.ttf": a font for humans not AI, and keyboard firmware to type in it.

The implementation of a font can be "hacked" to make what looks like gobbledegook to a computer, render as legible to humans. Copying and pasting text written in the font into AI to summarize is almost impossible. And to avoid AI image analysis, a version of the font can be loaded with the glyphs scattered and require a simple "focus" interaction by the reader to begin reading. Note that a sufficiently prompted AI agent can definitely read this, so it's not meant to be cryptographically sound, more just unfriendly to the common AI reader!

arplynn 35 minutes ago

Break search and screw over your disabled readers with this one weird trick! Legal in multiple countries

pedrogpimenta 2 hours ago

I love this! But won't the machine easily pick up on this?

billtarbell 2 hours ago

It's actually not really easy for AI, without the agent doing some actual coding itself to reverse engineer the font file, or to take screenshots at different variable font intervals to zone in on the "focused" version of the variable font. All of that being said, the intention (beyond just having fun creating it) was to make it AI "unfriendly" so AI bots doing broad quick reads of it are going to be left with gobbledegook encoded characters.

anon291 48 minutes ago

Most llms can equally engage with text in picture form as text in token form. In fact my initial research on this (later corroborated by actual published papers) indicate that this is a cheap way to save on tokens.

billtarbell 41 minutes ago

Oh interesting and good to know on the token savings with this technique. My test with claude had it use vision and then programmatically test different variable font input variables (mimicking the user scrub interaction) until it was able to OCR it.

cwnyth 2 hours ago

As they said in the comment you replied to: "Note that a sufficiently prompted AI agent can definitely read this, so it's not meant to be cryptographically sound, more just unfriendly to the common AI reader!"

emschwartz 3 hours ago

Hilarious. Nice work

billtarbell 3 hours ago

Thanks! Font against the machine! lol

ncr100 39 minutes ago

lol

cwillu 39 minutes ago

Fuck blind people I guess?

stronglikedan 20 minutes ago

I don't know why you'd feel so hostile towards the blind, but you do you...

vips7L 2 hours ago

Hilarious that Claude was used to make it.

cog-flex 2 hours ago

I truly lovely this as a conceptual exercise. However, I worry it will be easy for an agent to decompose. That said, well done.

john_strinlai 2 hours ago

neat idea! it is slightly amusing to find "btarbell and claude committed 2 weeks ago" in an anti-ai project.

ForHackernews 56 minutes ago

turns out the master's tools will dismantle the master's house