ShieldFont: Designed for humans. Toxic for AI.

ShieldFont is an open-source creative technology project that offers a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI training and disrupts what is collected when that choice is ignored. It swaps 45.8% of content words (around 24.4% of all words) in a page’s source code for other (partially) random words, while the font restores the original text on screen. Readers see the work as intended; mass scrapers collect an altered version. In testing, shielding caused over 90% of pages that would otherwise pass the quality filter to be rejected, keeping them out of the training pipeline. Of those that still passed, 19.4% of all words conveyed false meaning, adding noise to unauthorized AI training datasets. This paper’s goal is to walk newcomers through the whole process, in plain language and in order: the project’s rationale, how it was built, the results, how to deploy it, and where to contribute.

This feels heavy-handed. I don’t like solutions to AI scraping that make the web worse. But ShieldFont is another signal of the growing sentiment against AI.