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Posted by ray__ 4 hours ago

Decoy Font(www.mixfont.com)
239 points | 73 comments
OsrsNeedsf2P 3 hours ago|
Is it useful? No. Does it stop AI from reading it? Also no. But is it cool? Yes, it is very cool.
jszymborski 1 hour ago||
I think this illustrates that you can just do stuff without claiming it is useful. Like couldn't you just make this font and call it something like double-entendre or something?
BugsJustFindMe 1 hour ago||
You could, but is that what they've done?
jszymborski 1 hour ago||
I'm just saying they should just drop the dubious claims and just say "I made a font that I think looks cool".
BugsJustFindMe 1 hour ago||
Oh, I fully agree
jonplackett 2 hours ago|||
I just gave the day dream / pay bills image to ChatGPT and Gemini pro and they both could only tell me the pay bills text (shown with the thin lines)
goodmythical 1 hour ago|||
Gemini flash responds to "can you read both messages here?" with:

Yes, this is a clever optical illusion! Depending on which layers your eyes focus on, you can read two entirely different messages in this image:

    Message 1 (The sharp outline layer):

        PAY BILLS

        How to see it: Focus on the sharp, concentric black outline contours of the letters.

    Message 2 (The soft, blurry shadow layer):

        DAY DREAMS

        How to see it: Let your eyes relax/defocus slightly, or step back from the screen to focus on the soft, heavy grey drop shadows. The blurred shadows transform the "P" into a D, the "B" into a D, the "I" into an R, the "L"s into an M, and the "S" is shared!
xnickb 1 hour ago|||
Sure, but this is only as useful as useless it is.

Meaning the moment this gets wide adoption AI will have 0 issues dealing with it. LLMs are very good at translating one language to another.

Tubelord 10 minutes ago|||
If you present the text in an image / GIF format is could be useful.
jere 1 hour ago|||
It's similar to any anti face detection art. Probably useless but cool.
CGMthrowaway 3 hours ago|||
> Is it useful? No

Seems like it might have some use thwarting Ring/Flock/etc cameras within a specific proximity.

It's giving major "They Live" vibes.

inigyou 3 hours ago|||
The demonstration shows that it does stop AI
legohead 3 hours ago|||
I made an image and it fooled GPT. I asked it to look for a hidden message and it found the blurred word.

Still cool+fun though.

sheept 3 hours ago||||
It only works if you give it a screenshot, but it wouldn't work to block AI scrapers or fetch tools, and I think if printed out, it wouldn't work reliably if you took a photo, especially from afar
goodmythical 1 hour ago||||
The demonstration might, and it may work for certain models with certain prompts, but I just asked gemini if it could see both and it both did see both and gave me a tutorial on how I could see both as if it were a simple magic eye poster.
pixl97 29 minutes ago|||
I mean, I've worked for companies where their curated sales demonstrations showed the speed of light is easily breakable... Do your own testing with some thinking applied.

https://m.xkcd.com/1217/

I mean, I can defeat AI by putting white text on a white background and turning to a picture. Also means it's worthless for actual humans to read too. Try to actually use it on a site and chances are you'll get an ADA complaint.

Cshaya 3 hours ago|||
sometimes in life there is no reason to kick a rock around besides having fun ;)
Morromist 55 minutes ago|||
Ehh. Probably not many people will be using this particular thing to thwart ai BUT I think it may be a stop on a path towards something very useful someday.
ryant123 3 hours ago|||
Yeah, it looks good
TiredOfLife 2 hours ago||
Is it useful? No. Does it stop AI from reading it? Also no. But is it cool? Also no. Does it give me nausea? Yes yes yes.
gilesvangruisen 2 hours ago||
Sol (high)

"[screenshot] there's a hidden message in this text what is it"

"The hidden message is “HAPPY HUMAN.”

The visible outlines say “SORRY ROBOT,” but if you blur or squint at it, the shading underneath reads “HAPPY HUMAN.”"

make3 2 hours ago|
wow that's kind of crazy impressive that it can do that honestly, VLMs have gone so far, can't imagine the crazy amount of annotations they had to create to get to that level
Dwedit 3 hours ago||
This is just level of detail. Gemma E4B reads the sharper text until you resize down to 150x150, then it reads the other text.
crazygringo 3 hours ago||
As do I. The hero image clearly says "SORRY ROBOT" to me, which is the message supposedly intended for AI... kind of a fail.

It's only when I squint hard that I can see "HAPPY HUMAN".

hananova 3 hours ago||
You’re doing it the wrong way around, try intentionally letting your eyes defocus.
AlotOfReading 3 hours ago||
Downsizing is effectively low pass filtering, so that's expected. Any scheme that transmits different messages in different frequency bands is going to be susceptible to a similar attack.
redlewel 28 minutes ago||
Poor grannies trying to read the price of some book she wants to buy she can't tell if it says $150 or $15.0
mrweasel 3 hours ago||
Admittedly I'm a bit salty about LLMs due to they constant attacks on our infrastructure, the damage their doing to peoples minds and the general lack of morals shown by the AI companies, but things like this is rather childish and not really a solution to anything.
fckgw 2 hours ago|
Have you no whimsy?
pixl97 26 minutes ago|||
As a project they are kind of fun.

The problem is we see stuff like this try to get turned into actual products by people with questionable motivations and ethics.

Looking at you PhotoGuard/Nightshade.

theideaofcoffee 2 hours ago|||
NO FUN ALLOWED on srsbznz hacker news!
shlewis 3 hours ago||
Not even AI. I think I can write PIL script that will fix the font to be read by any ocr software.
xg15 2 hours ago||
I like how, if you hold the phone at a distance, but not as far as intended by the font, your brain sort of mixes letters from both messages.

I was at some point reading SAPPY ROMAN, HARPY ROBAN etc.

Also, viewing the "hidden message" works even better if you hold the screen at an angle, tilted away from you.

goodmythical 1 hour ago|
Also works if you scale/zoom the image. The crisp lines disappear entirely at a certain point.
fusslo 2 hours ago||
Maybe the more interesting thing is how far people are going to 'fight' against AI?

Just the fact that people are putting real thought and effort (even if it doesn't last too long...) is worth considering.

On the human side, I'm kinda losing patience proving I'm human. But, I also really like claude being able to access information.

klabb3 1 hour ago|
> Maybe the more interesting thing is how far people are going to 'fight' against AI?

All ”AI resistance” I’ve seen is not against the tech, but against human bad actors behind AI: unethical procurement of training data, reckless application, low effort high volyme spam, replacing humans, centralization of power, dependency on megacorps etc. I think a lot of people have become less tech-positive after the ad-tech era that brought us social media, unprecedented levels of surveillance, freemium rug pulls etc. It’s much easier to understand the resistance if you place it in that context, rather than imagining millions of sleeper agent luddites suddenly coming out of the woodworks.

jjcm 2 hours ago|
It's been really interesting seeing how LLMs perceive things differently than humans. I'm working on image->html conversion pipelines right now, and there are glaring issues LLMs run into that are obvious for humans. Any subtle gradients get lost, 75 degree angles get converted to 90 degree angles, etc.

This tracks towards what you're seeing with this font - the high frequency details get picked up, but the low frequency ones dont.

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