this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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[–] chazwhiz@lemmy.world 77 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Well look at that, it works!!

[–] Evildave@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I've found circle to search on android can read both variations depending on how you select the image

[–] arararagi@ani.social 3 points 4 days ago

Already defeated...

[–] recursivethinking@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

In selection 2, you don't seem to be selecting an image. You're selecting text.

In method 1, it's doing OCR. In method 2, its just reading the raw text data you selected. This is how you can copy text from thing A and Font A, and paste it into thing B with font B (depending on Thing B's paste settings)

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 9 points 6 days ago

Here’s the text my phone extracted from that image:

FUCK THE POUXCE

What does this say?

It says "THIN BLUE LINE."

The word BLUE is split between the second and third lines:

THIN

BLU

ELINE

•••

[–] naticus@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

THIN

BLU

ELINEB*

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 3 points 6 days ago

Edge detection moment

[–] Sandbar_Trekker@piefed.zip 23 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It works at full resolution, but it's a cat and mouse game. If something like this becomes popular, then all that needs to be done is to start passing images through a filter first (blur, lower resolution, etc.), or just train a new vision model that can pick out both the blurred message as well as the decoy message.

[–] Kactus@piefed.world 13 points 5 days ago

The downloadable font is especially vulnerable since each letter is a straight map, so easily trainable

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 28 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Good luck to the visually impaired and their screen readers.

[–] chazwhiz@lemmy.world 35 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

Screen readers read text directly, the point of this is to be used in images, which screen readers don’t read anyway.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Facedeer is a bad faith troll and AI evangelist, in case anybody is wondering why he's pretending to care about accessibility.

[–] chazwhiz@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Ahh, that explains the willful ignorance.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 2 points 4 days ago

By "bad faith troll and AI evangelist" XLE means "someone I disagree with about this topic, and therefore that I follow around obsessively accusing of being a troll."

He's really rather sad that way, I notice that every thread I've been in over the past few days with any relation to AI he's been adding this comment to. Guess he noticed me again. At least he's stopped calling me a literal bot or accusing me of being "from Reddit" as if that meant something nefarious.

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

My iPhone reads text from images. I wonder how it’d do with this?

[–] YourAvgMortal@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You can take a screenshot or save the image directly. My iPhone reads the blurry text without issue, so this may be more related to LLMs in particular, or of the image is compressed before the analysis, the illusion is broken

[–] YourAvgMortal@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Amazon Rekgnition struggles a little more but it’s still reading the blurry text instead of the lines

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 0 points 6 days ago (1 children)

And if this sort of font became common (and actually kept working) then screen readers never would be able to read these. The point remains that accessibility is being sacrificed for the sake of some kind of general "anti-AI" movement.

[–] CovertOperative@piefed.zip 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

There's no way this will become common. Non-visually impaired people don't want to read like that either.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 points 4 days ago

Back when generative image AIs first came into general awareness with Dalle-3 and Stable Diffusion and so forth, there was a fad of changing image alt text into deliberately misleading nonsense. Which, of course, was not great for the visually impaired back then either. It was ineffective and short lived, but it's still pretty annoying seeing people proudly declaring their intent to make things deliberately difficult for people who rely on technology for this kind of stuff. So IMO worth pointing out.

[–] OpenHammer6677@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

I'm pretty sure they're not the intended users

[–] marlowe221@lemmy.world 21 points 6 days ago

Well, I’m glad that we now have a font that makes it look like I’m not wearing my glasses… when I’m wearing my glasses.

[–] OpenHammer6677@lemmy.world 18 points 6 days ago

Person: does something impressive against AI Comments: it's bad because it's not perfect

[–] EmilieEasie@fedinsfw.app 18 points 6 days ago

This is art

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 18 points 6 days ago

Clever as fuck

[–] stellargmite@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago

Most AI systems work by reading the pixels of an image up close

In the case of text aren't LLM’s reading actual text ?Whats the usecase here ? For any text I dont want to be readable by ai scrapers and such, I need to use this font and render as image(s)?

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

Works better if you have crappy vision.

[–] Willdrick@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

Top points for effort, but if it's making it hard to read even 2 words.. I'd rather poison/prompt inject via invisible text and not make any humans cross-eyed trying to read that font

[–] Toes@ani.social 1 points 4 days ago

I think i might be a cylon. 🤖

[–] GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca 4 points 6 days ago

I think this is the first step in an arms race between fonts that can't be read by computers and systems to differentiate between obfuscated text.