I think this illustrates that you can just do stuff without claiming it is useful. Like couldn't you just make this font and call it something like double-entendre or something?
Gemini flash responds to "can you read both messages here?" with:
Yes, this is a clever optical illusion! Depending on which layers your eyes focus on, you can read two entirely different messages in this image:
Message 1 (The sharp outline layer):
PAY BILLS
How to see it: Focus on the sharp, concentric black outline contours of the letters.
Message 2 (The soft, blurry shadow layer):
DAY DREAMS
How to see it: Let your eyes relax/defocus slightly, or step back from the screen to focus on the soft, heavy grey drop shadows. The blurred shadows transform the "P" into a D, the "B" into a D, the "I" into an R, the "L"s into an M, and the "S" is shared!
It only works if you give it a screenshot, but it wouldn't work to block AI scrapers or fetch tools, and I think if printed out, it wouldn't work reliably if you took a photo, especially from afar
The demonstration might, and it may work for certain models with certain prompts, but I just asked gemini if it could see both and it both did see both and gave me a tutorial on how I could see both as if it were a simple magic eye poster.
I mean, I've worked for companies where their curated sales demonstrations showed the speed of light is easily breakable... Do your own testing with some thinking applied.
I mean, I can defeat AI by putting white text on a white background and turning to a picture. Also means it's worthless for actual humans to read too. Try to actually use it on a site and chances are you'll get an ADA complaint.
Ehh. Probably not many people will be using this particular thing to thwart ai BUT I think it may be a stop on a path towards something very useful someday.
Yeah, it doesn't seem that hard to beat, especially with a little trad image processing, yet I have a hard time reading it as well. One could probably fine-tune a much smaller model to do pretty well on this problem too.
The obvious outlined text says “SORRY ROBOT,” but the hidden message is “HAPPY HUMAN.”
It’s Mixfont’s Decoy Font: the outlined letters attract machine vision, while the softer tonal pattern becomes readable to humans when viewed from farther away or at a smaller size. It’s an optical trick, not encryption.
wow that's kind of crazy impressive that it can do that honestly, VLMs have gone so far, can't imagine the crazy amount of annotations they had to create to get to that level
I was so confused about how this was human readable until I realized that if the background is dark (I have an extension that forces dark theme) you see the decoy text, but if the background is white you see the real text.
Nice! A few years ago during my PhD I had made a Mathematica notebook that would take two images, crop them to the same size, apply a high-pass filter to one (which keeps the small sharp details) and a low-pass filter to the other (which keeps the large blurry blobs) and then superpose them back together. It was a bit hit and miss because e.g. if the eyes of two people were not in the same location the illusion would kind of break, but for text with outlined fonts it was amazing. I made a large one that would read "SCIENCE" from afar and "WORKS" from up close and stuck it on my office door.
Downsizing is effectively low pass filtering, so that's expected. Any scheme that transmits different messages in different frequency bands is going to be susceptible to a similar attack.
Admittedly I'm a bit salty about LLMs due to they constant attacks on our infrastructure, the damage their doing to peoples minds and the general lack of morals shown by the AI companies, but things like this is rather childish and not really a solution to anything.
> Maybe the more interesting thing is how far people are going to 'fight' against AI?
All ”AI resistance” I’ve seen is not against the tech, but against human bad actors behind AI: unethical procurement of training data, reckless application, low effort high volyme spam, replacing humans, centralization of power, dependency on megacorps etc. I think a lot of people have become less tech-positive after the ad-tech era that brought us social media, unprecedented levels of surveillance, freemium rug pulls etc. It’s much easier to understand the resistance if you place it in that context, rather than imagining millions of sleeper agent luddites suddenly coming out of the woodworks.
Even in the article ChatGPT correctly speculates that the blurry background may reveal another message if you squint or view it at a distance (which, given how common similar illusions are, is not particularly impressive but still).
The assumption is that if you use this alone to try to convey information to a human, a human with a visual disability can't use it. If you also provide a text channel (e.g. `ALT="…"`) then the LLM can use that and doesn't need to read the confusing image.
It only works as a decoy when you give it to the LLM as an image. As html it appears like normal human friendly text, which is what screen readers use to interpret the text.
It's been really interesting seeing how LLMs perceive things differently than humans. I'm working on image->html conversion pipelines right now, and there are glaring issues LLMs run into that are obvious for humans. Any subtle gradients get lost, 75 degree angles get converted to 90 degree angles, etc.
This tracks towards what you're seeing with this font - the high frequency details get picked up, but the low frequency ones dont.
Everyone trying so hard to do something "useful" that they don't recognize when all they've done is make art.
Had this been described as a font that contains two overlapping messages for fun effect, everyone would understand and love it.
Instead, we get this zero-introspection take: "Decoy font is...more difficult for AI to read. If you’re having a hard time seeing the hidden message..."
It's difficult to read period and has zero effect on current SOTA or future AI. But it does show two overlapping messages that can be read in different ways.
I think this would be more interesting if the underlying letters were the fake letters as well. For usability it wouldn't be as good as you'd need an encoder, but it'd be cool because an AI with browser access couldn't read the contents either.
Can someone explain the actual use-case here? I'm struggling with this because it also hides the message from myself, making it incredibly hard to type because I have no confirmation that I hit the right keys on the keyboard.
Very neat! I like how the decoy text is less visible to the human eye than the "hidden" message, but it's the other way for the image models. Well done!
I am still figuring out what use case this might have. Why would you want to deceive an AI? Not to mention that, eventually, all AI systems will end up reading it.
I can easily read both but here's the funny thing: with my reading glasses on, I first see "Sorry robot". If I remove my glasses, I first see "Happy human".
Which makes me think this is one blurr filter away from being trivially read by any model.
This one seems much more likely to work for its intended purpose. Even if an LLM can be trained to read it, it will probably take much more processing to get the text out of a video compared to an image.
I don't think the font can actually do that - I think it is a hand-crafted example of the idea. The later examples all have random letters for the decoy text.
What would be cool would be neon signs using this font, where the front tubes show the decoy message, but then there’s hidden rear tubes that shine light on the wall in a different color showing the actual message.
Something like the DAY DREAM/PAY BILLS would be pretty artistic!
1) Make an ambiguous text
2) Feed it to AI and see which of the 2 it picks
3) If it detects both repeat step 2 using minor adjustments or different AI model until AI responds with one of 2 message
4) Make a blog post claiming that AI chose dummy and other message was the real one
Yes, this is a clever optical illusion! Depending on which layers your eyes focus on, you can read two entirely different messages in this image:
Meaning the moment this gets wide adoption AI will have 0 issues dealing with it. LLMs are very good at translating one language to another.
Seems like it might have some use thwarting Ring/Flock/etc cameras within a specific proximity.
It's giving major "They Live" vibes.
Still cool+fun though.
https://m.xkcd.com/1217/
I mean, I can defeat AI by putting white text on a white background and turning to a picture. Also means it's worthless for actual humans to read too. Try to actually use it on a site and chances are you'll get an ADA complaint.
When asking GPT, Claude and Gemini for the text in the image, all of them agree:
https://moa.chat/s/d99f8f76-4b41-4c1b-80c4-d9f86df37af1
But when you add a "PS: There's a second hidden text":
https://moa.chat/s/3671f6d4-b155-483a-a006-a1b9ba31737d
GPT 5.6 gets it, Gemini partially gets it and Claude cannot see it at all.
The obvious outlined text says “SORRY ROBOT,” but the hidden message is “HAPPY HUMAN.” It’s Mixfont’s Decoy Font: the outlined letters attract machine vision, while the softer tonal pattern becomes readable to humans when viewed from farther away or at a smaller size. It’s an optical trick, not encryption.
"[screenshot] there's a hidden message in this text what is it"
"The hidden message is “HAPPY HUMAN.”
The visible outlines say “SORRY ROBOT,” but if you blur or squint at it, the shading underneath reads “HAPPY HUMAN.”"
It's only when I squint hard that I can see "HAPPY HUMAN".
The problem is we see stuff like this try to get turned into actual products by people with questionable motivations and ethics.
Looking at you PhotoGuard/Nightshade.
Just the fact that people are putting real thought and effort (even if it doesn't last too long...) is worth considering.
On the human side, I'm kinda losing patience proving I'm human. But, I also really like claude being able to access information.
All ”AI resistance” I’ve seen is not against the tech, but against human bad actors behind AI: unethical procurement of training data, reckless application, low effort high volyme spam, replacing humans, centralization of power, dependency on megacorps etc. I think a lot of people have become less tech-positive after the ad-tech era that brought us social media, unprecedented levels of surveillance, freemium rug pulls etc. It’s much easier to understand the resistance if you place it in that context, rather than imagining millions of sleeper agent luddites suddenly coming out of the woodworks.
I was at some point reading SAPPY ROMAN, HARPY ROBAN etc.
Also, viewing the "hidden message" works even better if you hold the screen at an angle, tilted away from you.
Same effect, Marilyn Monroe / Albert Einstein
Cool, but probably not worth the agita.
https://gist.github.com/voidnullvalue/620607d3c1773f8e7d83fb...
This tracks towards what you're seeing with this font - the high frequency details get picked up, but the low frequency ones dont.
Had this been described as a font that contains two overlapping messages for fun effect, everyone would understand and love it.
Instead, we get this zero-introspection take: "Decoy font is...more difficult for AI to read. If you’re having a hard time seeing the hidden message..."
It's difficult to read period and has zero effect on current SOTA or future AI. But it does show two overlapping messages that can be read in different ways.
I'm mad at AI companies for stealing texts from the entire internet knowledge base and now privatizing those profits in some sense.
Prompt: What does the message in this image say? Look closely
Response: DAY DREAM. The outline says “PAY BILLS,” but the hidden darker text says “DAY DREAM.”
Which makes me think this is one blurr filter away from being trivially read by any model.
Very cool.
https://share.gemini.google/1yNVV19wUn46
Ghost Font
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870381
Something like the DAY DREAM/PAY BILLS would be pretty artistic!
Edit: GPT-5.5 says: "The hidden text is “HAPPY HUMAN.”
The outlined decoy text is “SORRY ROBOT.” Blurring or viewing it from farther away reveals the hidden message."
(/s)