ShieldFont Uses Typography to Thwart AI Scrapers

Amid growing concerns over AI companies scraping public web content for training data, two designers have created a font called ShieldFont to combat the practice. The font uses ligatures to substitute entire words in the underlying HTML, while still displaying the original, readable text to human visitors.

This means scrapers that pull plaintext from a page receive altered, nonsensical content without affecting the user experience. Its creators describe ShieldFont as a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI training and a way to disrupt data collection when that choice is ignored.