ShieldFont: a font that feeds AI scrapers nonsense while humans read normally

Designers Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio have created ShieldFont, a typeface that displays perfectly readable text to human visitors while serving AI web scrapers a subtly altered, nonsensical version in the underlying HTML. The system exploits ligatures — a standard typographic feature that replaces letter pairs with alternative glyphs — to corrupt the data collected by scrapers. The designers describe it as a practical opt-out tool for web publishers who want to block unauthorised AI training on their content.

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AI companies' penchant for scraping through large swathes of the public web in search of valuable training data has already led to lawsuits and technical fixes aimed at stopping the practice. Now, a pair of designers are hoping to stymie these scrapers with a new font designed to offer people a perfectly readable webpage while serving scrapers a subtly edited, nonsensical version in the underlying HTML.

ShieldFont, as designers Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio write in a recent white paper , was made to offer web publishers "a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI training and [to] disrupt what is collected when that choice is ignored."

When is a horse a potato?

The font is based around ligatures , a long-standing feature of many fonts that is usually used to replace certain letter pairs with a more readable version when they're smushed up next to each other. With ShieldFont, though, those ligatures are instead used to replace entire words with others in an attempt to destroy the text's value to scrapers. This substitution only happens when the font engine draws the page on screen, meaning scrapers that simply download plaintext source code get an altered version that end users never see.

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ShieldFont: a font that feeds AI scrapers nonsense while humans read normally

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