New font designed to disrupt AI data scraping

A new font system called ShieldFont aims to disrupt and deter unauthorized data scraping by artificial intelligence (AI) models. Designed to be indistinguishable from standard text for human readers, the font subtly alters the underlying HTML source code. This manipulation introduces decoy words, causing automated scrapers to ingest incoherent or incorrect data, thereby degrading the quality of AI output.

The ShieldFont project, a collaboration involving Brazilian creative studio Seneda & Abrucio and Danish type foundry PlayType, repurposes a typographical feature known as ligatures. Traditionally used to aesthetically combine specific letter pairs, ShieldFont employs this mechanism to replace entire words within the source code. By substituting words, the system confuses AI language models that rely on predictable word associations and sentence structures to process information.

For instance, a sentence like "The knight rode his horse into battle" might appear in the source code as scraped by a bot as "The knight rode his engine into battle." This deliberate introduction of "poisoned" data aims to raise the cost and complexity for AI developers engaged in large-scale scraping, encouraging them to seek licensed data sources instead.

ShieldFont's creators report that their system successfully caused over 90% of protected content to be rejected by bot quality filters during testing. Of the remaining accepted text, 19.4% was found to assert false meanings. While scrapers can attempt to circumvent this by capturing images of the text, this significantly increases operational costs. The ShieldFont protocol is open-source and aims to create a more balanced digital information ecosystem.