Image - ShieldFont
The predator/prey arms race applies as Shield Font is building fonts able to shield content from AI's 24/7 heist in order to feed its LLM, something most interesting to this old designer because selecting appropriate fonts for any given project was an essential part of the creative process. :)
A new “AI-proof” font was designed to be hard for AI agents to scrape, but you can’t tell by just looking at it. Unlike other anti-AI fonts that use letters that are difficult for bots to read, ShieldFont swaps out words behind the scenes to poison the data that automated scrapers take without permission.
ShieldFont was designed as part of a project created by a group of professionals including the Brazilian creative studio Seneda & Abrucio and the Danish type foundry PlayType. It shields text from large language models (LLMs) by garbling sentences in the HTML source code, leaving automated scrapers to sift through sentences filled with decoy words that make a sentence incoherent. Thanks to a custom font on a backend, though, the real text is displayed for a human reader to see.
How it works
ShieldFont works using ligatures, the technical term in typography when two letters next to each other in a word are combined into a single glyph. Ligatures are designed for aesthetics, so letter combinations like fi in “fish” or fl in “flow” look naturally spaced instead of visually cluttered. When a program sees these specific letters next to each other, it swaps two characters for one that combines the letters into a single glyph. ShieldFont works in a similar way, except instead of letters, it swaps out whole words.
Amazing site, amazing tech. :)
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