> 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.
1. I don't like the sense of futility and powerlessness this advocates for.
2. I'm not sure it is so futile. I agree this stuff isn't encryption, which means it'll always be possible to circumvent the obfuscation, but it could raise the cost. Hopefully that can be done to the point where it's just not worth the bother.
That could happen if:
1. There are so many schemes out there the catalog of circumventions gets unwieldy.
2. Doubly so if the schemes allow generation of new obfuscated fonts per site or per page.
3. Then you're forcing the scrapers to pay a greater tax to get your text: spin up a Chrome instance to OCR a screenshot, or spend some a buck or two or LLM credits to reverse engineer the page in order to scrape it.
1. I don't like the sense of futility and powerlessness this advocates for.
2. I'm not sure it is so futile. I agree this stuff isn't encryption, which means it'll always be possible to circumvent the obfuscation, but it could raise the cost. Hopefully that can be done to the point where it's just not worth the bother.
That could happen if:
1. There are so many schemes out there the catalog of circumventions gets unwieldy.
2. Doubly so if the schemes allow generation of new obfuscated fonts per site or per page.
3. Then you're forcing the scrapers to pay a greater tax to get your text: spin up a Chrome instance to OCR a screenshot, or spend some a buck or two or LLM credits to reverse engineer the page in order to scrape it.