This font looks perfectly normal to humans but wreaks havoc on AI

ShieldFont is a newly created font designed to make it difficult for artificial intelligence agents to scrape and misuse content. Unlike traditional anti-AI fonts that use challenging-to-read letters, ShieldFont employs a different approach by altering the meaning of sentences through word substitution in the HTML source code. This results in decoy words that make the scraped content incoherent, thus deterring automated scrapers.

The font was developed by a team of professionals, including Brazilian creative studio Seneda & Abrucio and Danish type foundry PlayType, to counter unauthorized large language model (LLM) scraping. The system functions by rearranging words based on specific rules, ensuring that the altered text remains comprehensible to humans while confusing AI models.

For instance, a sentence like "The knight rode his horse into battle" could be transformed into "The knight rode his engine into battle," disrupting the accuracy of AI-generated outputs. The developers aimed to make this process costly and challenging for scrapers, thereby discouraging them from unauthorized data extraction. Although ShieldFont introduces some inconvenience for human readers, as search engines index the substituted text, publishers can mitigate this issue by using the font for content that does not rely on search traffic. The font is open-source and compatible with various typefaces, ensuring its broad applicability.