SoulsOnly.tff – A font for humans not AI and keyboard firmware to type in it(github.com)
42 pointsby billtarbell4 hours ago5 comments
  • blahgeek2 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-v2 hours ago
      How would a human copying/pasting a number work?
      • rpastuszakan hour 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.

  • billtarbell4 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!

    • arplynnan hour ago
      Break search and screw over your disabled readers with this one weird trick! Legal in multiple countries
    • pedrogpimenta2 hours ago
      I love this! But won't the machine easily pick up on this?
      • billtarbell2 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.
        • anon2912 hours 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.
          • billtarbellan hour 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.
      • cwnyth2 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!"
    • emschwartz3 hours ago
      Hilarious. Nice work
    • cwilluan hour ago
      Fuck blind people I guess?
      • stronglikedanan hour ago
        I don't know why you'd feel so hostile towards the blind, but you do you...
        • coreyp_132 minutes ago
          They meant that this is a technique that relies on a person's vision, which means that the blind, by definition, are being excluded. They weren't being hostile toward the blind, they were pointing out that the project itself is hostile towards the blind.
  • vips7L2 hours ago
    Hilarious that Claude was used to make it.
  • john_strinlai2 hours ago
    neat idea! it is slightly amusing to find "btarbell and claude committed 2 weeks ago" in an anti-ai project.
    • ForHackernews2 hours ago
      turns out the master's tools will dismantle the master's house
      • adampunk43 minutes ago
        That remains to be seen.
  • cog-flex2 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.