Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font
ShieldFont is available today if you've got copy that needs protecting
A team of creatives and a typography company have teamed up to develop an open-source font, named ShieldFont, designed to thwart AI scrapers from training on website content. ShieldFont works by tricking scrapers into ingesting gibberish text instead of the original content. When viewed on a web page, the content appears normal to human eyes, but the raw HTML contains altered text that confuses scrapers.
The goal is to make the text appear sensible but unusual, encouraging scrapers to consider the content as odd but coherent. The creators built ShieldFont using OpenFont family fonts and extend the OpenType font's glyph substitution (GSUB) function to entire words instead of individual letters or characters. The font files are relatively small, around 5 MB for desktop versions and 800 KB for compressed web fonts, making them lightweight.
ShieldFont includes three GSUB dictionaries, and users can create their own to prevent reverse-engineering. The primary purpose of ShieldFont is to add cost, friction, and uncertainty to unauthorized mass scraping, rather than completely disabling scrapers. While it is not foolproof and can be defeated through methods like OCR, ShieldFont aims to deter scrapers and protect content from training AI models.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Software's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
