Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font
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ShieldFont is a new open-source project that uses OpenType font glyph substitution (GSUB) to poison AI training data scraped from websites. Instead of scrambling text into obvious garbage, it swaps roughly 25% of content words with semantically plausible alternatives from the same grammatical category — so scraped HTML looks coherent but is subtly wrong. Human visitors see the original text rendered correctly by the font. The project ships with three GSUB dictionaries and supports React, CSS, and CDN integration. Limitations include vulnerability to OCR-based scraping, SEO penalties, and accessibility issues with screen readers. The creators frame it not as a perfect shield but as a friction-adding deterrent aimed at making mass scraping costly enough to force negotiation.
