Decoy Font

https://www.mixfont.com/experiments/decoy-font

67•ray__•1h ago

Comments

ChrisArchitect•1h ago

Related from same:

Ghost Font

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870381

paularmstrong•1h ago

Can someone explain the actual use-case here? I'm struggling with this because it also hides the message from myself, making it incredibly hard to type because I have no confirmation that I hit the right keys on the keyboard.

certifiedloud•1h ago

Just squint and it'll become clear.

tomtheelder•50m ago

Zoom out and you'll see the hidden message

samschooler•59m ago

I think this would be more interesting if the underlying letters were the fake letters as well. For usability it wouldn't be as good as you'd need an encoder, but it'd be cool because an AI with browser access couldn't read the contents either.

wronex•26m ago

I was thinking this too. Then it might as well look like a normal font. But copy-paste and you get a garbled mess. Screen readers though.

9999px•56m ago

I screenshot the example and neither Claude nor ChatGPT had any problems reading both phrases. I don't get it.

noman-land•56m ago

This seems like it would absolutely wreck the experience for people using screen readers.

cush•47m ago

It only works as a decoy when you give it to the LLM as an image. As html it appears like normal human friendly text, which is what screen readers use to interpret the text.

atarian•46m ago

How? AFAIK screen readers don’t do OCR.

kps•36m ago

The assumption is that if you use this alone to try to convey information to a human, a human with a visual disability can't use it. If you also provide a text channel (e.g. `ALT="…"`) then the LLM can use that and doesn't need to read the confusing image.

OsrsNeedsf2P•49m ago

Is it useful? No. Does it stop AI from reading it? Also no. But is it cool? Yes, it is very cool.

ryant123•34m ago

Yeah, it looks good

inigyou•27m ago

The demonstration shows that it does stop AI

sheept•21m ago

It only works if you give it a screenshot, but it wouldn't work to block AI scrapers or fetch tools, and I think if printed out, it wouldn't work reliably if you took a photo, especially from afar

legohead•12m ago

I made an image and it fooled GPT. I asked it to look for a hidden message and it found the blurred word.

Still cool+fun though.

Cshaya•7m ago

sometimes in life there is no reason to kick a rock around besides having fun ;)

Dwedit•48m ago

This is just level of detail. Gemma E4B reads the sharper text until you resize down to 150x150, then it reads the other text.

crazygringo•33m ago

As do I. The hero image clearly says "SORRY ROBOT" to me, which is the message supposedly intended for AI... kind of a fail.

It's only when I squint hard that I can see "HAPPY HUMAN".

hananova•24m ago

You’re doing it the wrong way around, try intentionally letting your eyes defocus.

AlotOfReading•25m ago

Downsizing is effectively low pass filtering, so that's expected. Any scheme that transmits different messages in different frequency bands is going to be susceptible to a similar attack.

voidnullvalue•47m ago

I generated a skill.md that reads this trivially. What kind of testing are you doing prior to release?

https://gist.github.com/voidnullvalue/620607d3c1773f8e7d83fb...

shlewis•44m ago

Not even AI. I think I can write PIL script that will fix the font to be read by any ocr software.

mrweasel•39m ago

Admittedly I'm a bit salty about LLMs due to they constant attacks on our infrastructure, the damage their doing to peoples minds and the general lack of morals shown by the AI companies, but things like this is rather childish and not really a solution to anything.

hyperhello•37m ago

How does it know HAPPY HUMAN translates to SORRY ROBOT? Is there a cycle in there or something?

pavon•18m ago

I don't think the font can actually do that - I think it is a hand-crafted example of the idea. The later examples all have random letters for the decoy text.

MinimalAction•34m ago

Extremely cool. I'm sure they'll eventually be trained to read it, but it's nice until then to trick AI.

I'm mad at AI companies for stealing texts from the entire internet knowledge base and now privatizing those profits in some sense.

meerita•33m ago

I am still figuring out what use case this might have. Why would you want to deceive an AI? Not to mention that, eventually, all AI systems will end up reading it.

jaakkoc•32m ago

Cool. Now do an accessible version.

(/s)

deadbabe•31m ago

What would be cool would be neon signs using this font, where the front tubes show the decoy message, but then there’s hidden rear tubes that shine light on the wall in a different color showing the actual message.

Something like the DAY DREAM/PAY BILLS would be pretty artistic!

btbuildem•11m ago

Very neat! I like how the decoy text is less visible to the human eye than the "hidden" message, but it's the other way for the image models. Well done!