The web’s newest weapon against AI scrapers is a font
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.
Reported by 1 outlet — Ars Technica. See all sources ↓
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. ShieldFont, as designers Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio write in a recent white paper, was made to offer web publishers "a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI training and [to] disrupt what is collected when that choice is ignored." When is a horse a potato? The font is based around ligatures, a long-standing feature of many fonts that is usually used to replace certain letter pairs with a more readable version when they're smushed up next to each other.
Read the full report at Ars Technica ↗
Why it matters
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- What's the story?
- 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.
- How widely is it covered?
- 1 outlet, average source rating 7.0/10.
- When was it last updated?
- 5m ago.
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The web’s newest weapon against AI scrapers is a font
Sources1TypeCoverageArs Technica