Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
The article critiques "anti-AI" fonts designed to obfuscate text from AI models, arguing they are ineffective and harmful. It highlights significant accessibility issues for screen readers and disabled users, and warns that such efforts merely provide benchmarks for AI companies to overcome. The author also raises privacy concerns regarding potential centralized identity verification systems.
Why it matters
This article is significant because it challenges a popular but flawed approach to AI resistance, emphasizing the critical importance of accessibility and privacy while warning against impractical and ultimately futile methods in the face of advancing AI capabilities.
Making “anti-ai” fonts that obfuscate or scramble text is a fools errand. For fonts that scramble text, it's an accessibility problem, since the scrambled text is what screen readers and other accessibility tools will parse. Already, you've cut out many of the humans you're trying to reach.
In case you aren't aware of what I'm referring to, here are a few examples:
Edit: I'd like to preemptively clarify I don't have anything against these specific examples, nor am I trying to invalidate the work that went into creating them or any other examples of anti-AI fonts. This post is meant to critique the idea itself. I'm not trying to put-down anyone here!
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