Comment on Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

buran@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s explained in the article, with examples. Which specific aspect(s) of this explanation do you need help with?

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  • buran@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Mostly about the glyph substitution.

    I get that it takes some combination to replace them to words and make the text incoherent, but I don’t get how it’s configured or how the AI can’t get a coherent text. I would get it if it was OCR, but scrapping?

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    • Manjushri@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Apparently, and I hope someone will correct me if I’m wrong, the AI scrapers gather their data from the page source rather than from what we users see on the screen. The text in the page source when using this font will appear to be gibberish. When the font is applied, the glyph substitution occurring between the source and the browser, the text is transformed into the author’s intended verbiage for the user to read.

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    • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Imagine if you converted a p to an l and a c, but used styling to make those two letters look like a p

      Same idea… The actual letters on the page are wrong, but when they’re rendered back into pixels through the browser they look correct. OCR and humans would be able to read this fine, but AI tools usually fetch the raw page and strip out the unimportant bits to save tokens

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