Posted by justswim 6 hours ago
It seems to me like it should be easy enough to take Ghost Font, apply normal video compression techniques, and analyze the compressed signal to recover the visual outline of the letters, which you would then analyze with OCR (or an AI I guess ...). In other words, a novel CAPTCHA technique but not necessarily "fundamentally more difficult" than existing CAPTCHA techniques, once the cat-and-mouse game gets going.
So once the technique is known by the model the font stops working as intended.
I can barely read the actual message, and it's about as "readable" to me as the Magic Eye 3D pictures. Actually I think I have a headache from looking at it on a mobile screen.
As a research idea it's cool though. But I do wonder if/when AI models will figure out how to decode it - I imagine a bit of additional prompting would get them there.
My phone would have been zooming out the browser window, and making the dots even tinier, but the phone is HiDPI so it would have still preserved the dots. My eyes are middle-aged and probably starting to do the same kind of median-blur effect that models do when they resize an image. That's my current guess for why I can see the decoy more clearly on mobile.
If that's the case, then this trick will stop working as vision models approach pixel-perfect vision, instead of the current resizing that they do. Pretty cool as steganography though.
Wait, what? Seriously? That’s the only text I can see. Am I an AI?
WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS
STAYS IN VEGASThe text is a video. Every frame contain random dots, so an individual frame by itself doesn't contain the intended message
This "font" exploits the fact that current-gen frontier models will process video one frame at time, but each frame is noise, so by looking at frames in isolation doesn't reveal anything
Then, they add a hidden message to each frame just so that the agent report something and stop trying (because if the agent tried to correlate between the frames, they could discover the trick)
But if you pass just a frame, there is no message. Just the noise plus the decoy
https://i.imgur.com/CgtyGjl.png
From a single frame you can definitely identify boundaries because the dots are sliding and get truncated.
So there are two texts, one decoy (which you can barely see in a single frame but becomes more clear if you average between frames) and an actual text, which disappears in single frames or averaged ones.
EDIT: On second look, the static screenshot does say "WRITTEN IN GHOST FONT".
HackerNews never disappoints
EDIT: To be clear, I'm talking about the "Written in Morse Code" example, fully hallucinated text. The AI agents seeing a decoy message isn't as bothersome to me.
So...usefulness?
