ShieldFont open-source font swaps words to poison AI scraping
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ShieldFont is an open-source typeface that replaces about 25% of words in a page's HTML—nearly half of its content words—with decoys of the same grammatical class, while the font renders the original text on screen. Its authors report that across 1,500 passages this caused 50% to lose their original factual claim, and that about one in ten chunks still passed the FineWeb-Edu quality filter after shielding. The project ships three built-in mappings plus support for custom ones. Its FAQ states the font itself is a codebook from which all 11,962 word pairs were recovered, so the defense targets the cost of mass scraping rather than secrecy. ShieldFont currently works only in English, runs in the Dynamic Websites tier and requires JavaScript—most scrapers never run any. Screen review, touch exploration and JAWS are untested, and NVDA does not announce the unlock.
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- Hacker News · AIShieldFont launches open-source font that swaps words in page source to disrupt AI scraping
ShieldFont is an open-source tool that replaces roughly 25% of words, nearly half of content words, in a page's HTML with same-grammar-class decoys while the font restores the original text on screen. Its authors report that across 1,500 passages this caused 50% to lose their original factual claim, and that about one in ten chunks still passed the FineWeb-Edu quality filter after shielding. The project ships three built-in mappings plus support for custom ones, and its FAQ states the font itself is a codebook from which all 11,962 word pairs were recovered, so the defense targets mass scraping cost rather than secrecy.
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