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
Get smart on it
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.
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