The web’s newest weapon against AI scrapers is a font
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
AI companies scrape large portions of the public web to collect training data, prompting designers to create ShieldFont, a font that displays readable text to human users while serving scrambled text to scrapers. The font uses ligatures to replace words with semantically similar alternatives from different contexts, making scraped content nonsensical and poisonous to AI training datasets. While ShieldFont pages can still be read by humans, scrapers that pull raw HTML source code receive altered versions that either get rejected by quality filters or contain false information. The approach is designed to make large-scale scraping more expensive and time-consuming, since properly rendering pages to bypass the font would cost significantly more than simply downloading HTML code.
One short email a day with the stories that matter. Free. Unsubscribe with one click.
Want to go deeper than the news? Explore live, cohort-based AI courses taught by practitioners.
Browse AI courses on Maven
Nvidia is reportedly preparing to fire Jensen Huang
Nvidia's board is preparing to dismiss CEO Jensen Huang following a report from the New York Times about a second alleged extramarital affair, just days after he admitted to a separate affair with a woman alleged to be a Chinese spy, The Wall Street Journal reports. The second alleged affair was with an executive who reports to him, Nvidia's vice president of health care, Kimberly Powell, according to the Times, saying the two may have been captured on video "being affectionate
Also reported by TechCrunch
The unfolding Jensen Huang scandal: a timeline
The affair could have ramifications for national security as the U.S. and China race to develop the most advanced AI infrastructure.
Jensen Huang accused of having another affair, with an Nvidia exec
Jensen Huang, who has come under fire for admitting to an affair with a woman accused of being a Chinese intelligence agent, has been accused of having a separate affair with an Nvidia subordinate.
Congress to call Jensen Huang in to answer for alleged Chinese spy affair
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has until the end of the day Wednesday to answer a call from House Republicans for a closed-door briefing on his affair with alleged Chinese spy.
Nvidia is investigating Jensen Huang’s relationship with a Chinese spy
Nvidia has announced that it is opening an investigation into CEO Jensen Huang and his relationship with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, who was reportedly recruited by China's Ministry of State Security to spy on the company. A statement posted by the board of directors reads: The NVIDIA Board is initiating an independent investigation in light of recent reporting that founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. A committee of independe
Also reported by TechCrunch, Wired AI and Data Center Knowledge
A 13-Year-Old Asked AI About Suicide on Her School Laptop. It Didn’t Get Flagged for Weeks
The young girl’s parents allege that she used Gemini via her school Chromebook to plan her suicide, but the school’s monitoring systems didn’t know until it was almost too late.