billtarbell

Thanks and lol yeah regarding using claude for this. Didn't intend to come across as generally anti-AI, I'm just interested in exploring ways where we can connect person to person with a reasonable assumption that AI isn't intermediating our communication.

LOL yeah, jokes on claude for helping me create something AI-unfriendly i guess!

The encoded data and the font file go over the network. The font file is executed locally on the readers machine.

Certainly no. But point taken. This really isn't intended for use on a website like that, more a fun exploration of the difference between human and AI perception. That being said, I updated the project with an analogous audio experiment version for the unsighted.

Point taken. This really isn't intended for that, more a fun exploration of the difference between human and AI perception. That being said, I updated the project with an analogous audio version.

Oh interesting and good to know on the token savings with this technique. My test with claude had it use vision and then programmatically test different variable font input variables (mimicking the user scrub interaction) until it was able to OCR it.

It's actually not really easy for AI, without the agent doing some actual coding itself to reverse engineer the font file, or to take screenshots at different variable font intervals to zone in on the "focused" version of the variable font. All of that being said, the intention (beyond just having fun creating it) was to make it AI "unfriendly" so AI bots doing broad quick reads of it are going to be left with gobbledegook encoded characters.

Thanks! Font against the machine! lol

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!

This is a great article and I have been observing these trends and tradeoffs from my vantage point in the ecommerce platform landscape having worked across all models. I am very interested in thinking through what Model is next. Most break out companies have done so on business model (vs feature) innovation. I'm looking forward to reading more... and always happy to collaborate on thinking.