ShieldFont
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The web’s newest weapon against AI scrapers is a font
“ShieldFont” aims to poison AI training data without making pages unreadable for people.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/new-font-turns-ordinary-webpages-into-nonsense-for-ai-scrapers/
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It will also break regular (non-AI) search engines.
Even the usual Ctrl-F/⌘-F (local search functions) would break.
And there is no guarantee that future AI models cannot decode it.
Chances are good that future AI models will “beat” this thing while the non-AI and the local search functions continue to not work. -
It will also break regular (non-AI) search engines.
Even the usual Ctrl-F/⌘-F (local search functions) would break.
And there is no guarantee that future AI models cannot decode it.
Chances are good that future AI models will “beat” this thing while the non-AI and the local search functions continue to not work.Chances are good that future AI models will “beat” this thing
That's what I was thinking. Anything a human can either already is or soon will be read-able by AI tools.
The article says this:
ShieldFont isn’t a foolproof defense, either. Any page that’s readable by a human could also be correctly interpreted by an AI scraping tool that simply renders the full webpage and uses optical character recognition on an image of the output.
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