Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font
If you don't want AI scrapers training themselves on your website, there's a new way to stop them that doesn't involve server-side blocking or praying they respect your instructions in robots.txt. A team of creatives have teamed up with a typography company to create a new type of font that’ll trick LLM scrapers into ingesting poisoned gibberish.
Dubbed ShieldFont, the open-source project almost seems like magic if you're not familiar with the ins and outs of computer fonts. Look at a web page written using a ShieldFont font and it’ll appear exactly as one would expect: All the content words (the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that give a sentence meaning) are the same as the writer originally wrote.
Inspect the raw HTML that a scraper reads from a ShieldFonted page, however, and you’ll see a sentence that’s essentially gibberish. Typing “good luck reading this, you useless robot” in...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to theregister.com. To see the full text click HERE
