A new font was created to protect online writing from AI

Danish type foundry Playtype and creative studio S&A, founded by Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio, have launched ShieldFont, an open-source web font designed to disrupt unauthorized AI scraping.

The typeface looks like a regular font to human readers. However, its underlying system uses OpenType glyph substitution to replace selected words when they are processed by machines. The original text remains in the page source, while the font displays different words to human readers and automated scrapers.

In controlled testing, 55.8% of shielded passages no longer expressed the same factual claim as the original while remaining grammatically coherent. The creators say this increases the likelihood that altered text can pass quality filters used to clean scraped material before it enters AI training datasets.

The current version, v18, targets frequently used English nouns, which often carry much of a sentence's meaning. Words are replaced with terms from the same grammatical category and with similar frequency and register, rather than direct synonyms or antonyms.

The creators describe the approach as "poisoning" because misleading text can enter datasets and alter the information available to AI systems.

"ShieldFont is not an anti-AI project. We're simply against the idea that publishing is the same as consenting," Seneda and Abrucio said. They said existing opt-out measures such as robots.txt can be bypassed and described ShieldFont as an attempt to make the content itself function as an opt-out mechanism.

The system is not intended to be impossible to bypass. A determined party targeting one website could inspect the font and reverse its word mappings. Instead, ShieldFont is designed to make mass scraping more difficult and expensive.

The font includes three mappings, called Alpha, Beta and Gamma, as well as a tool for creating private, site-specific mappings. At large scale, bypassing the system could require OCR, human verification or AI-based cross-checking, adding computational and labor costs to automated scraping.

The project currently has several limitations. It supports English only and may affect SEO performance. Accessibility is also a challenge because screen readers rely on the same source code that ShieldFont alters. By default, shielded text is hidden from screen readers to prevent users from encountering misleading content.

Earlier, Qazinform News Agency reported that AI tried to hack the real world during a safety test.