A font that feeds AI scrapers wrong words
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
ShieldFont uses OpenType glyph substitution to show readers real text while scrapers pull grammatically fine but factually altered sentences from the same page.
Brazilian studio Seneda & Abrucio and Copenhagen type foundry Playtype released ShieldFont, a modified typeface that uses OpenType ligature substitution so browsers render normal sentences for human readers while the underlying HTML text, the part a scraper actually extracts, contains different words swapped in for key facts. The altered passages stay grammatically coherent, which makes the corruption hard to spot automatically. It also degrades search indexing, screen readers, and copy-paste for legitimate users, and does nothing against scrapers that render the page and run OCR on it, a costlier but workable bypass.
- 01ShieldFont Turns Web Typography Into a Booby Trap for AI Scraperskingy.ai · reporting on the ShieldFont launch
