AI is obviously ruining everything on the internet, but so are AI scrapers. They vacuum up everyone’s content up without permission. They put a huge strain on servers. It’s getting rarer and rarer to be able to type a URL in, hit enter, and actually reach the website you’re looking for without encountering a screen that asks you to prove you’re human, wasting precious seconds of your life.
Thankfully, a team of designers are working to stick it to the scrapers by throwing a wrench into their works — that wrench being a fiendishly difficult-to-digest font.
As spotted by Ars Technica, the font, called “ShieldFont,” looks like regular text to human eyes when rendered inside a web browser. But when AI scrapers swallow the pure HTML of a webpage they’re trying to steal content from, what they’re actually ingesting is a bunch of nonsensical goop that the font disguised, poisoning their data set.
“Nothing currently makes it costly to ignore a publisher’s wishes,” the tool’s creators, Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio, wrote in a white paper about their work. “This paper explores a different approach: making the text itself polluted, harder, and more expensive to collect without permission.”
