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?
I once held the belief that any marketing material showed the exact opposite of reality, and this page does exactly that: It doesn't stop AI from reading it, but it sure stops me!
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!
Now it would be interesting to give it some text on blurry nonsense to see what affect that has.
Probably that it just reports it can't find the second message or that one is not present but I wonder if it would flag it up and if that could be spammed?
(Not that I'm suggesting anyone do that you understand).
I think this demonstrates very clearly that artificial intelligence is merely a facsimile of human intelligence - and that as soon as human intelligence is capable of identifying, differentiating, and associating facts about a thing, artificial intelligence rapidly gains the same capabilities.
And it also highlights the corollary in an amusing way: If we want to defeat AI, we have to become better humans. That means, identifying, differentiating and associating with other humans - not technology.
Creating a font for humans but not for AI was a noble task. Obviously, it won't persist. If we want to avoid the takeover by AI, we have to stop dating robots ..
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
It would be trivial to train future models to detect and read it though (and some already can, based on other comments in this thread). It only works as much as it does because it's new and reading it hasn't been a goal.
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.
Actually cringe and painful. One thing I don't appreciate about the Fedi is the people for whom technology politics conceals contempt for end users and once you get left of the Fedi it is 100% of the people.