反AI字体既无用又有害
Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

原始链接: https://blog.yaros.ae/anti-ai-fonts-are-useless-and-harmful/

在这篇博文中,安德鲁(Andrew)认为旨在扰乱文本的“反人工智能”字体既无效又有害,最终也是徒劳的。他指出,这些字体造成了严重的无障碍访问障碍,因为屏幕阅读器无法正确解析经过混淆的文本。此外,他警告称,建立区分人类和人工智能访问的系统,可能会迫使残障用户进行存在问题的集中式身份验证。 从技术角度来看,安德鲁断言这些混淆方法仅仅充当了“基准测试”,人工智能开发人员可以轻松克服。只要人类能阅读这些内容,人工智能终将被训练得能够解析它们。他认为,这种持续的“猫鼠游戏”可能会导致互联网基础设施受到限制——例如强制性的付费墙或严苛的版权保护——从而破坏互联网开放和易于访问的精神。最后,他总结称,阻止人工智能访问公共信息没有“灵丹妙药”,并主张应将此视为现代互联网的基本现实。

近期 Hacker News 上关于“反人工智能字体”的讨论,反映了在保护内容免受人工智能抓取,与优先考虑可访问性及技术现实性这两方观点之间的尖锐分歧。 支持者认为,尽管这些字体并不完美,但它们作为一种必要的工具,能够提高人工智能公司的获取成本,使自动化抓取在经济上变得不那么划算。一些人认为,这些字体是针对未经授权使用人类创造力进行更广泛、必要抵制的第一步。 相反,许多评论者认为这些字体是无效的“隐蔽式安全”。批评者指出: * **可访问性:** 这些字体对依赖屏幕阅读器和其他辅助技术的残障人士造成了不成比例的伤害。 * **徒劳无功:** 人工智能模型正在迅速发展;开发人员可以通过光学字符识别(OCR)或训练模型来解码这些特定模式,从而轻松绕过混淆。 * **自我挫败:** 通过“破坏”网页的可读性,创作者往往会流失人类流量,从而将他们的作品从原本希望触达的受众面前隐蔽起来。 归根结底,目前的共识倾向于认为技术上的“陷阱”是徒劳的,并指出这是一个社会和法律问题,而非可以通过字体设计获胜的技术战。
相关文章

原文
Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful – Andrew's WebLog

Making “anti-ai” fonts that obfuscate or scramble text is a fools errand. For fonts that scramble text, it's an accessibility problem, since the scrambled text is what screen readers and other accessibility tools will parse. Already, you've cut out many of the humans you're trying to reach.

In case you aren't aware of what I'm referring to, here are a few examples:

Edit: I'd like to preemptively clarify I don't have anything against these specific examples, nor am I trying to invalidate the work that went into creating them or any other examples of anti-AI fonts. This post is meant to critique the idea itself. I'm not trying to put-down anyone here!

There is just no way to do this accessibly, since an accessible solution will require machine-accessible metadata. This pushes us back to the giant issue of human verification, and all the privacy and security concerns associated with it. Ultimately, trying to solve the problem of selectively granting access to metadata for disabled people will lead towards filtering content through some centralized identity verification system. Unless you're a Nazi or some sort of sociopath, creating large lists of disabled people is not a road I think we want to travel down.

The public posts and discussions being had about this subject are already informing AI companies on how to train their multimodal models to get around these obfuscations, most of which have already been broken. I'd argue every new font and tech demo is effectively a benchmark, daring AI firms come up with solutions to sidestep them. And they will be sidestepped, one way or another. If a human can see the information, that means there is a way the information can be parsed. "Ghost" fonts will become just another scraping obstacle with its own set of contingencies.

Some of the more elaborate demos I've seen involving motion graphics and videos are impractical for normal use on websites and therefore are irrelevant as serious long-term solutions to this problem. Besides, if an effective obfuscation method somehow gains widespread use, then a much higher priority will be placed on breaking it, eventually rendering it useless.

A cat-and-mouse game like this is pointless if it results in a world where all websites are highly obfuscated, requiring computationally expensive systems to access the content legitimately or illegitimately. The end result will probably be some sort of copy-protection system which will benefit those who want to censor the web and create paywalls and other gatekeeping methods to block access to content. We're better off with the web as it is now, written entirely in plaintext. Besides, obfuscation goes against the spirit the World Wide Web was founded on: free and open access to information for the benefit of humanity.

I don't think there will ever be a silver bullet for this problem. While the speed at which their capabilities will increase is highly debatable, AI systems are never going to start getting dumber. Like it or not, all publicly available information will inevitably become accessible to anyone and anything that has permission to access it. This is the baseline scenario people need to plan around.

#ai #fonts #typography #web

联系我们 contact @ memedata.com