SoulsOnly.tff – A font for humans not AI and keyboard firmware to type in it

Reminds me of an anti-crawl mechanism I encountered some time ago in a financial data provider's website: for all numbers in the table, a special font is used where 0~9 are randomly rendered as different chars (e.g. '0' is rendered as 5, '1' is rendered as 8, etc.). The backend server returns the "encoded" chars, and is then correctly "decoded" by the font. The font changes after each reload. So humans always see the correct numbers, but when some crawler uses the HTML source, the numbers are incorrect.

Everyone rushing to make their content AI-friendly made me want to figure out how to make content AI-unfriendly. Basically human-written words meant for human eyes only.

So I built "SoulsOnly.ttf": a font for humans not AI, and keyboard firmware to type in it.

The implementation of a font can be "hacked" to make what looks like gobbledegook to a computer, render as legible to humans. Copying and pasting text written in the font into AI to summarize is almost impossible. And to avoid AI image analysis, a version of the font can be loaded with the glyphs scattered and require a simple "focus" interaction by the reader to begin reading. Note that a sufficiently prompted AI agent can definitely read this, so it's not meant to be cryptographically sound, more just unfriendly to the common AI reader!

Hilarious that Claude was used to make it.

I truly lovely this as a conceptual exercise. However, I worry it will be easy for an agent to decompose. That said, well done.

neat idea! it is slightly amusing to find "btarbell and claude committed 2 weeks ago" in an anti-ai project.