Decoy Font - Hacker News

Posted by ray__ 5 hours ago

Decoy Font(www.mixfont.com)

239 points | 73 commentspage 2

voidnullvalue 5 hours ago|

I generated a skill.md that reads this trivially. What kind of testing are you doing prior to release?

https://gist.github.com/voidnullvalue/620607d3c1773f8e7d83fb...

ligarota 4 hours ago|

[dead]

jryan49 2 hours ago||

Squinting is surprisingly effective for me for seeing the hidden text. That's really cool!

MPSimmons 2 hours ago||

Also goes the other way, where you use the decoy to give instructions to the AI...

noman-land 5 hours ago||

This seems like it would absolutely wreck the experience for people using screen readers.

hungryhobbit 1 minute ago||

Forget about screen readers: I'm looking at it on a monitor and I just see the robot version!

atarian 5 hours ago|||

How? AFAIK screen readers don’t do OCR.

kps 4 hours ago||

The assumption is that if you use this alone to try to convey information to a human, a human with a visual disability can't use it. If you also provide a text channel (e.g. `ALT="…"`) then the LLM can use that and doesn't need to read the confusing image.

cush 5 hours ago||

It only works as a decoy when you give it to the LLM as an image. As html it appears like normal human friendly text, which is what screen readers use to interpret the text.

kube-system 3 hours ago||

Which means that this font is entirely useless unless it is implemented in a way that breaks screen readers.

calebm 2 hours ago||

Made this with it: https://www.instagram.com/p/Da3WMAEFi7f/

jotato 3 hours ago||

Hermes using gpt-5.5

Prompt: What does the message in this image say? Look closely

Response: DAY DREAM. The outline says “PAY BILLS,” but the hidden darker text says “DAY DREAM.”

BugsJustFindMe 2 hours ago||

Everyone trying so hard to do something "useful" that they don't recognize when all they've done is make art.

Had this been described as a font that contains two overlapping messages for fun effect, everyone would understand and love it.

Instead, we get this zero-introspection take: "Decoy font is...more difficult for AI to read. If you’re having a hard time seeing the hidden message..."

It's difficult to read period and has zero effect on current SOTA or future AI. But it does show two overlapping messages that can be read in different ways.

jambalaya8 2 hours ago|

I see uses for it that have nothing to do with AI, and which are not at all art.

MinimalAction 4 hours ago||

Extremely cool. I'm sure they'll eventually be trained to read it, but it's nice until then to trick AI.

I'm mad at AI companies for stealing texts from the entire internet knowledge base and now privatizing those profits in some sense.

samschooler 5 hours ago||

I think this would be more interesting if the underlying letters were the fake letters as well. For usability it wouldn't be as good as you'd need an encoder, but it'd be cool because an AI with browser access couldn't read the contents either.

wronex 4 hours ago|

I was thinking this too. Then it might as well look like a normal font. But copy-paste and you get a garbled mess. Screen readers though.

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