This free font can trick AI scrapers into swallowing gibberish instead of your content
A Brazilian creative studio called Seneda & Abrucio has teamed up with Playtype, a Copenhagen-based type foundry, to build something that doesn't rely on asking nicely to keep crawlers away. They call it ShieldFont, and it's essentially a free, open-source web font with a twist. It works by showing you... Read Entire Article
A novel approach to thwarting AI scrapers has emerged, leveraging a free font called ShieldFont. Developed by Seneda & Abrucio, a Brazilian creative studio, and Playtype, a Copenhagen-based type foundry, the font aims to protect web content from being copied and used in training datasets. By employing an automated process known as OpenType glyph substitution, ShieldFont displays different content to AI scrapers compared to humans.
While users see the intended text, scrapers receive garbled, gibberish output. This is achieved by replacing entire words with their grammatically appropriate counterparts from a pre-defined dictionary. Roughly 25% of words in each block are substituted, ensuring the text remains coherent for AI training purposes while effectively concealing the original content.
Despite being difficult to circumvent, ShieldFont is not entirely foolproof. Screenshots and OCR technologies can still reveal the true content, as can screen readers utilized by individuals with visual impairments. Currently, ShieldFont focuses solely on English support, with the source code available on GitHub for integration into websites via a React component.
Written by urgent.news from TechSpot's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
