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Decoy is an ambigious font that "hides" from AI [1]

['Bobson Dugnutt']

Date: 2026-07-17  

Decoy is a font where each glyph is ambigious, the idea being that machines will interpret it one way and humans another. In the example above, HAPPY HUMAN is the hidden blurred text behind the clearer SORRY ROBOT text. Some casual testing by the Hacker News crowd suggest it doesn't work very well, but it's an interesting demonstration of an idea ("Is it useful? No. Does it stop AI from reading it? Also no. But is it cool? Yes, it is very cool.") See also Ghost, a Magic Eye-style edge-perception headache, from the same creators.The problem: if a human can tell, a human can tell the machine what to look for. This is why captchas trend toward increasing cost rather than increasing confidence. Good luck finding all the traffic lights on a Tor relay!

Previously:

• Tiny pixel fonts are a challenge. With double-width pixels, they're a nightmare.

• Kernit: a Jim Henson-inspired font and pun that will turn you green

• Creating a font from a classic comic

• Teranoptia is a font for designing weird creatures

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/07/17/decoy-is-an-ambigious-font-that-hides-from-ai.html

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