[SyneRyder]

Took me a long time to realise that "Written In Ghost Text" wasn't actually the text I was meant to be reading, and that was only the decoy message.

I can barely read the actual message, and it's about as "readable" to me as the Magic Eye 3D pictures. Actually I think I have a headache from looking at it on a mobile screen.

As a research idea it's cool though. But I do wonder if/when AI models will figure out how to decode it - I imagine a bit of additional prompting would get them there.

[Hendrikto]

Funny, for me it is exactly the opposite: I can read the actual text very easily, but the “Written in Ghost Text” is barely perceptible to the point I would have completely missed it, if it were not for the comment pointing it out here.

[SyneRyder]

I've just tried it on my large desktop monitor (roughly 1440p, not HiDPI), and I now see "Ghost Font" extremely clearly and can't see the decoy at all. If I scale my browser window to 30% zoom, then I can just see the "Written In Ghost Text" decoy message again.

My phone would have been zooming out the browser window, and making the dots even tinier, but the phone is HiDPI so it would have still preserved the dots. My eyes are middle-aged and probably starting to do the same kind of median-blur effect that models do when they resize an image. That's my current guess for why I can see the decoy more clearly on mobile.

If that's the case, then this trick will stop working as vision models approach pixel-perfect vision, instead of the current resizing that they do. Pretty cool as steganography though.

[stvltvs]

Flipping my phone between portrait and landscape thereby changing image size is enough to determine which message is legible to me.

[Lerc]

That would confirm that this is more related to algorithmic filters than human perception.

[coatmatter]

On my mediocre laptop display, I had to set the brightness moderately, and take my glasses off to see the decoy text more easily (easier than squinting). Deleting the custom text also made it easier. The other tip someone posted about moving the window around also helps a lot. Moving further back from the display also helps.

[icedchai]

Same. If I move the window around, I can perceive the "Written in Ghost Text"... Otherwise, not at all.

[kemayo]

Same, I had no sense of the decoy message at all until I read that comment.

[kiicia]

It depends on how big/dense is your screen, high frequency message is actual text while low frequency message is decoy text. Probably so that it shows when frames are averaged together without checking actual motion vectors. It is similar effect like that image showing either young woman or old man depending on distance you are viewing it from (or other one with either Einstein or Marylin Monroe)

[edit] http://lentitaliane.it/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/illus...

[Reason077]

> ”Took me a long time to realise that "Written In Ghost Text" wasn't actually the text I was meant to be reading, and that was only the decoy message.”

Wait, what? Seriously? That’s the only text I can see. Am I an AI?

[mort96]

Are you looking at a still image or the video? The text is blindingly obvious to me in the video, while I'm having serious trouble seeing "Written In Ghost Text".

But a still frame doesn't contain the information necessary to see the actual message, so when it's paused, I can only barely see something which I suppose says something along the lines of "written in ghost text".

[therealpygon]

It seems highly resolution and scale dependent and seems to rely on the idea of a user being on a PC.

This is super useful; I’ve always wanted my information to be illegible when scaled…

[sebastiennight]

Have you ever visited the cloud city of Zalem, by any chance? Got any interesting tattoos done on your forehead?

[r-w]

Uh... Yes. Probably.

[hedora]

Has anyone tried asking an LLM to write a program to decode the message?

I’m guessing it is a one-shot task. On the other hand, it’s illegible to a large percentage of humans.

I always thought that once computers got better at solving captchas than humans, they would go away.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

[Lerc]

Ah, I can't see magic eye pics. The secondary text is invisible to me as well. An Ai would probably be able to get it with multiple samples, so in the lonmg run it is more likely to be readable to AI than humans.

[r-w]

...are you an LLM? I can't read the decoy message at all.

[SyneRyder]

I don't think I am — but I am rather Claude-pilled, and graphics algorithms are right in my wheelhouse.

I look forward to being able to see C-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhäuser Gate.