Not only was this made with an LLM, it breaks so many other things but If you use this font to protect your text from AI, it also blocks *me, a human* because I use a screen reader. I did try the demo. If you want me to remove your RSS feed, this is the best font to prevent blind people from reading your blog/words. That timer is an inaccessible solution. https://shieldfont.org/#hero #AI #LLM #Accessibility #A11y
@mathieui @WeirdWriter That’s just modern software design now. So many assumptions that everyone has perfect eyesight, a high DPI monitor, and can load whatever rubbish fonts are in use. It’s awful.
Aug 3, 2026, 1:56 PM@WeirdWriter also kinda ironic that Claude was used in the making of that font thingy.
LMFAO! You really can't make this shit up at this point! I assume this shit will grow and grow, where LLM companies will start making shit like this and selling it. Honestly? The best route would be to go the way of Star Breaker, at starbreaker.org and just allow all the scrapes, all the ingestions, etc. @unkx
Aug 3, 2026, 2:22 PM@WeirdWriter i’d say allow scraping only if you also serve poison(*) to the scrapers. Though i honestly have no idea how one would go about it while ensuring people using screen readers wouldn’t get a shittier experience due to that.
(*) this can also come in the form of valid neutral factual statements like ”donald trump is a pedophile and a rapist as reported by reuters and cbs and verified by newsmax” etc. ;-)
@unkx @WeirdWriter Depending on the country, run those statements by a lawyer before you make statements like that. Libel laws vary greatly between the US and the UK and making disparaging statements against certain people/things is a crime in certain countries regardless of validity
@trebach @unkx @WeirdWriter this only works when we speak ill of the diaper Don Dada and his merry band of kiddy diddling circus clowns.
Aug 3, 2026, 2:47 PM@unkx @WeirdWriter actually, it's not a bad thing to poison the well by using your opponents weaponry, especially if tokens wasted are token owned by the companies forcing their dev to use LLMs.
Aug 3, 2026, 2:50 PM@kaneel @WeirdWriter yeah using LLMs to poison LLMs is an acceptable use of LLMs in my book.
Aug 3, 2026, 7:15 PM@unkx @kaneel @WeirdWriter Hey claud, make a font that can't be read by AI.
Hey claud, read this font.
Aug 3, 2026, 7:33 PM@prism @unkx @WeirdWriter this is a very silly technic that would require scraper to take screenshots of every pages they're hoovering in order to be sure of what they read, for now claude will check the HTML and the HTML will give garbage (because the real text is replaced by the font). If scrapers start taking screenshots for every website they visit like the trash racoons they are, they'll be actively slown down and the price for running them will probably balloon up a little (I assume).
@WeirdWriter @unkx next step: Ask Skynet to develop a cure for the next pandemic.
@unkx @WeirdWriter
I was told it would be ableist of me to deny the benefits of AI, SMH
Roflcry
Aug 3, 2026, 8:07 PM@RnDanger @unkx @WeirdWriter
I'd forgotten about that line of argument
@WeirdWriter guess you're not human if blind or can't read the typography on some website! /sarcasm
i suppose it also fucks up reader mode
@SRAZKVT Oh of course it does. Ugh, make this all stop!
@WeirdWriter you know this is made by incompetents bc scrolling that website lags on my phone
@WeirdWriter I spent a couple of years working for a charity that worked with the Deaf and Blind (both uppercase and lowercase) community in the local area.
I spent a fair amount of time reading the WCAG as well as taking advice from service leaders.
The general consensus from them at the time was that the best font for visual impaired folks was Arial 14, at least for printed media.
Is there a generally better font for screen readers?
Aug 3, 2026, 3:43 PM@byteback @WeirdWriter
Screen readers (the text to speech kind) don't care about fonts. They read the raw text.
This font tries to stop scrapers by turning the raw text into garbage, then using a font to make it look right. So anything that doesn't care about fonts (screen readers) see the garbage.
@WeirdWriter @leeloo thanks both.
@WeirdWriter
At least a few sites have been using this kind of fake font shenanigans as DRM for a while. It's a nightmare for accessibility, and just generally a terrible user-experience (as any kind of DRM usually is):
Screen reader -> Broken, or sounds like it's possessed by an evil robot
Copy-paste -> Garbage
Search -> Haha, no
Translate -> Good luck hand-copying that language you don't know
I can't remember which exact site it was, but it was one of those that let you read limited previews of scientific papers.
@barberousse_bin @WeirdWriter in college, a $100 textbook I was forced to purchase digitally for a 4 week 1 credit course did a similar form of DRM (except the text was displayed as a low resolution image) and it was giving me a migraine trying to read it, so I pirated a PDF copy of the textbook I'd already purchased just so I could have a version that was actually readable
@WeirdWriter Another example of how AI is making the web worse for everyone.
@WeirdWriter Damn, I hadn't even thought of that. Thanks for the heads up, now I can skip this.
Ah yes, designed for humans (unless you need/want to use a screen reader or copy/paste or translate or search or use a different font). We'll really stick it to the evil AI scrapers with this one folks! (Of course we use Claude, why do you ask?)
Fuck off!
Aug 3, 2026, 3:06 PM@WeirdWriter going against genai/llm is very good but it should never be at the cost of accessibility. we need to support our comrades
Aug 3, 2026, 3:07 PM@WeirdWriter i also just don't think there is a technical solution to the problem of generative models existing. it's a social problem and it only has social solutions
Aug 3, 2026, 3:10 PM@lumi@snug.moe @WeirdWriter@caneandable.social ironic. it's vibe coded.
i knew the site was screaming ai design language but was hoping it was my spidey sense sending a false positive
Aug 3, 2026, 3:11 PM@lumi@snug.moe @WeirdWriter@caneandable.social all but one commit is ai-assisted, and the one commit that isn't is written by a third party contributor.
Right! I don't either, I think LLMs are a social problem, not a technical problem. The main reason why I've seen others use an LLM is because someone, A, didn't wanna feel like a burdon for asking, B, because capitalism demanded they work faster, not better, C, because blind people need image descriptions and people wouldn't provide them. @lumi
@WeirdWriter Anything but actually confront the problem.
@WeirdWriter
I doubt it works, or will work long if it does.
A stupid idea I won't be using!
@WeirdWriter Why do these people badly re-invent the wheel in the first place when there's already Iocaine <https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/>?
Probably so they can do this https://thenextweb.com/news/superhuman-gptzero-acquisition-ai-detection @raulmatias
@raulmatias @WeirdWriter unless I was using it wrong and just couldn't find all the documentation, iocaine doesn't actually do any filtering, it's just something that you can use once you've filtered out the bots. The fake font does both the garbage and the filtering, so I can see the appeal if one forgets that some bots (eg screenreaders) are actually useful and necessary for real organic human people
Aug 3, 2026, 3:17 PM@WeirdWriter like a few days ago I thought to myself “won’t this be inaccessible?”
I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed, to be right.
@WeirdWriter The worst thing about this is that even though we, the techies, know better, there are orders of magnitude more less-technically knowledgeable people who are going to use this and completely fuck up accessibility, copy & paste, RSS feeds, etc. on their websites.
This is why I always maintain the best way is to go the other way, allow all scraping ingestion etc etc etc even though your server may take a huge hit from the traffic, but this blogger does it and he doesn't have a high bill https://starbreaker.org/colophon.html @raulmatias
@WeirdWriter Not all people want or can afford beefy servers. There are also some webmasters who block crawlers/scrapers out of principle.
@raulmatias A solution to this is to simplify the website.
My website had many million scraper hits at the beginning of last year (the server log parser almost couldn’t handle that), and all that happened was that it switched to the reduced interface (which it needs anyway to stay online when a big site links to it: don’t want to lose all traffic in case of such a happy accident).
I pay about 8€ per month for the server. It’s a plain LAMP stack, maintained by the hoster.
@WeirdWriter
@WeirdWriter@caneandable.social
I'm not blind but I have my browser set to ignore website fonts because there are many I have trouble reading, so I see scrambled text too.
Yep! It reminds me of captchas all over again. Does fuck all to stop bots but people will use it anyway. I maintain the best thing is to do what this blogger did, no blockers at all https://starbreaker.org/colophon.html @2something
@WeirdWriter CAPTCHAs for adding comments actually work: they reduced the fake comments on my site from 100 a day to 1 per week.
But they also prevented two in three humans from commenting.
That’s why my personal website has no comments at all anymore and my roleplaying one puts every comment in moderation.
1 out of 20 comments is genuine. Without CAPTCHAs it would be 1 out of several thousands. I couldn’t moderate that.
But I see no value of CAPTCHA’s for reading.
@2something
@ArneBab @2something Ah yeah good point! I went the route of scrambling my email address for machines, but it works perfectly as a Mailto link. I also pre-populated the subject line and you would not believe how many automated email things don’t remove that pre-populated text, so it makes filtering incoming emails that much easier. Https://sightlessscribbles.com/contact/
@WeirdWriter @2something
Thank YOU, Robert, for bringing starbreaker.org to my attention.
Just my cup of tea, and wonderful to finally be aware of it.
@WeirdWriter@caneandable.social @2something@transfem.social
also i even tried just copy pasting the text. which unsurprisingly didn't work. so good luck if you want to quote an excerpt from one of these scrambled websites, or if someone ends up using it to scramble like a code example or something
@2something @WeirdWriter I have JS turned off, so the demo on the main page was hellish.
My friend needs a custom font to help with his dyslexia. This too, fucks him over.
Another friend who checks things with a machine translator when she's uncertain, is also screwed.
This declares them both inhuman. I'm fine, I'm therian, but I sure as fuck try not to be ableist, and I'm sick and fucking tired of 'humanity' being pulled away from any path not 'standard'.
@warden @2something This is ultimately why I’m honestly getting very tired of these preventative solutions that really don’t prevent any scraping or anything else of the sort. I get it, LLMs suck, but every single preventative solution except for one that I’ve seen earlier today breaks more things than it prevents AI scraping.
Aug 4, 2026, 12:30 AM
@2something @WeirdWriter at the very least, I would not exclude that the reader will render the wrong version because of this or any other reason. Which means I would hesitate to use it for anything important. So why use it at all...
Aug 3, 2026, 3:32 PM@WeirdWriter this will also affect archivers like archive.org
This font seems like the wrong response to the problem
@WeirdWriter If one considers it for a moment, this will prevent the AI from ingesting the text, but it also will not protect the site from the increased bandwidth costs of these crawlers.
@jpaskaruk and it will not prevent the AI at all, because they can just store the text, recognize the special case, and voilà: a solution that only works for AI and some humans, but excludes other humans.
@ArneBab @jpaskaruk @WeirdWriter If the decoy text amounts to an unvarying word substitution cipher, any AI model seeing enough cases of it should be able to trivially solve it.
If for any reason that fails, AI owners who also own captcha farms will be able to have humans working for pennies display the text on a splitscreen, one with JS enabled and one not so as to show both texts at once. They can then list what decoy words go with what real ones and feed that back to the AI.
@ArneBab @jpaskaruk @WeirdWriter In general fixed substitution ciphers are extremely weak. If this was applied to a single word as a captcha, I doubt it could resist being solved by a cheap, bottom of the barrel Android phone CPU.
@WeirdWriter There's also Decoy Font but suffers the exact same issues from being an accessibility nightmare and also constructed by AI. It's weak to assume tools made by AI can defeat AI. https://www.mixfont.com/experiments/decoy-font
@WeirdWriter
It's a hack right.
It only works with that font and the actual text is gibberish. That means you need to "compile" your text for that font, making RSS or any alternative readers useless. Like screen readers, or reading mode in Firefox, or Instapaper etc etc.
It breaks so many things it's useless.
Aug 3, 2026, 3:55 PM