Decoy Font(mixfont.com)
588 points by ray__ 20 hours ago | 138 comments
tl;dr: Decoy Font is a downloadable TTF font that uses the hybrid image technique—thin high-frequency foreground letters overlaid on blurred low-frequency background letters—so humans read one message up close (or when zoomed out) while OCR and LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini tend to read the decoy. It's derived from DejaVu Sans Mono, free for personal and commercial use, and pitched as an anti-scraping tool, though the author admits smarter agents or targeted prompting can defeat it.
HN Discussion:
  • Accusation of plagiarism from a 2017 academic paper on the same technique
  • ~Cool concept but not practically useful as an anti-AI tool
  • Testing shows LLMs can actually detect the hidden text with simple prompting
  • The technique is easily defeated by downsampling or resizing the image
  • ~Reverse approach (garbled text readable to humans) would be more useful