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Comment by OsrsNeedsf2P | Hacker News Reader

Is it useful? No. Does it stop AI from reading it? Also no. But is it cool? Yes, it is very cool.

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?

You could, but is that what they've done?

I'm just saying they should just drop the dubious claims and just say "I made a font that I think looks cool".

Oh, I fully agree

Doing something that's interesting or cool without claiming any pragmatic use is usually called art.

This could more readily be seen as an art project.

Or a hobby.

I once held the belief that any marketing material showed the exact opposite of reality, and this page does exactly that: It doesn't stop AI from reading it, but it sure stops me!

In most of the examples I can't tell whether the outlined message or the blurred message is the one I'm supposed to be reading

> 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.

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)

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.

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!

Is that reading the image? Or just identifying the source of the image and returning the authors write up on their website?

You’d have to use new images with different messages using that font to be sure Gemini isn’t “cheating” here

Now it would be interesting to give it some text on blurry nonsense to see what affect that has.

Probably that it just reports it can't find the second message or that one is not present but I wonder if it would flag it up and if that could be spammed?

(Not that I'm suggesting anyone do that you understand).

You've told it that there are 2 messages.

That was 7 hours ago. Now, Google Images not only reads the text but links to that web site.

... wherein it's made known the author can't lose. good for the author

I think this demonstrates very clearly that artificial intelligence is merely a facsimile of human intelligence - and that as soon as human intelligence is capable of identifying, differentiating, and associating facts about a thing, artificial intelligence rapidly gains the same capabilities.

And it also highlights the corollary in an amusing way: If we want to defeat AI, we have to become better humans. That means, identifying, differentiating and associating with other humans - not technology.

Creating a font for humans but not for AI was a noble task. Obviously, it won't persist. If we want to avoid the takeover by AI, we have to stop dating robots ..

The demonstration shows that it does stop AI

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

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.

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.

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.

> Try to actually use it on a site and chances are you'll get an ADA complaint.

I really doubt that. We've had 2 decades of godawful letter-based CAPTCHAs and I don't think anyone got into legal trouble because of it?

They tend to have something like a sound captcha too

In the past, the vast majority used not to.

It would be trivial to train future models to detect and read it though (and some already can, based on other comments in this thread). It only works as much as it does because it's new and reading it hasn't been a goal.

sometimes in life there is no reason to kick a rock around besides having fun ;)

It's similar to any anti face detection art. Probably useless but cool.

If you present the text in an image / GIF format it could be useful.

That's an accessibility nightmare for people with vision issues.

Could definitely make some fun art or advertising pieces with it using blurred objects or people behind it like its frosted glass

Yeah, it looks good

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.

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.

Actually cringe and painful. One thing I don't appreciate about the Fedi is the people for whom technology politics conceals contempt for end users and once you get left of the Fedi it is 100% of the people.

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