{"id":22978,"date":"2026-07-30T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/type-designers-have-created-a-free-font-that-poisons-ai\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T12:00:00","slug":"type-designers-have-created-a-free-font-that-poisons-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/type-designers-have-created-a-free-font-that-poisons-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Type designers have created a free font that \"poisons\" AI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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We’ve seen some creative innovations designed to protect creative work online in the era of AI scraping. Nightshade <\/a>is a tool that adds a ‘poison’ to digital art files to pollute datasets when images are used for AI training. Now a type foundry and creative agency have done something comparable for typography, creating a typeface that anyone can use to shield their work.<\/p>\n

A couple of weeks ago, we reported on Ghost Font<\/a>, which uses a kind of optical illusion<\/a> to prevent AI from reading text. It’s a fascinating experiment but has significant limitations. It relies on movement, so it only works as a video or GIF, and there’s a high likelihood that AI will come to outsmart it as new models analyse video by optical flow instead of individual frames.<\/p>\n

There’s also the issue that Ghost Font’s noisy static isn’t great to look at for any length of time. You’re not going to using it to present an entire website, that’s for sure. But now a sleeker and more practical solution has just dropped. ShieldFont is a free web font that’s highly legible but hides text from AI bots and can contaminate AI datasets \u2013 and it’s open-source with a toolkit that can be applied to any font.<\/p>\n

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ShieldFont hides the real meaning of text from AI, and poisons it for good measure <\/span>(Image credit: Playtype \/ S&A)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

ShieldFont was created by the Brazilian creative studio Seneda & Abrucio<\/a> (S&A) and the Copenhagen-based type foundry Playtype<\/a>. The objective was to create a versatile typeface that looks like regular text to human readers but feeds scrapers altered wording.<\/p>\n

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\"ShieldFont<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>

ShieldFont changes select words in the source code behind the text shown on a website <\/span>(Image credit: Playtype \/ S&A)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Unlike Ghost Font, there’s no optical illusion at work. Visually, ShieldFont Optik is an adaptation of PlayType’s existing Optik typeface, and it’s available in six weights, from Regular to Black.<\/p>\n