HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

A font that humans can read but AI cannot(mixfont.com)

71 points·by justswim·قبل 4 ساعات·65 comments
mixfont.com
A font that humans can read but AI cannot

https://www.mixfont.com/ghost-font

71 comments

ssl-3·قبل 3 ساعات
I pasted a screenshot of the default text ("GHOST FONT") into ChatGPT 5.6 Sol, told it to read it, and without further instruction it chewed on it for awhile before coming back with:

  WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS
  STAYS IN VEGAS
nextaccountic·قبل 3 ساعات
> a screenshot

The text is a video. Every frame contain random dots, so an individual frame by itself doesn't contain the intended message

This "font" exploits the fact that current-gen frontier models will process video one frame at time, but each frame is noise, so by looking at frames in isolation doesn't reveal anything

Then, they add a hidden message to each frame just so that the agent report something and stop trying (because if the agent tried to correlate between the frames, they could discover the trick)

But if you pass just a frame, there is no message. Just the noise plus the decoy
stabbles·قبل 3 ساعات
If you take a frame you see it's neither random nor dots:

https://i.imgur.com/CgtyGjl.png

From a single frame you can definitely identify boundaries because the dots are sliding and get truncated.
singularity2001·قبل 3 ساعات
Exactly. It's a good idea, badly executed.
doublerabbit·قبل ساعة واحدة
"Content not available in your country" - obviously working well.
stavros·قبل 3 ساعات
What did you expect from a screenshot of obvious noise? The only thing that makes the text readable is the motion.

EDIT: On second look, the static screenshot does say "WRITTEN IN GHOST FONT".
[deleted]·قبل 3 ساعات
plastic-enjoyer·قبل 3 ساعات
> I posted a screenshot of static white noise to AI

HackerNews never disappoints
SyneRyder·قبل 3 ساعات
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·قبل 3 ساعات
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·قبل ساعتين
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.
bradley13·قبل 3 ساعات
Humans can read it, but with difficulty. If it becomes important, AI can be taught to read it.

So...usefulness?
dgellow·قبل 3 ساعات
It’s a research project, that doesn’t need to be useful. They wanted to explorer that area and share their findings
sevenzero·قبل 3 ساعات
Also this can always result in something useful over time. I'd love if AI safe writing will be possible at some point again...
dhruvkb·قبل 3 ساعات
Claude Opus 4.8 can read it with a single prompt and no instructions on how to read it.

https://ibb.co/WWMSXQkQ
picture·قبل 3 ساعات
Is the answer correct? I don't seem to see any demo video with "this is a ghost font" encoded
ozgung·قبل 3 ساعات
It is actually correct but not in the intended way. Delete all the sample text. If you look at your screen from a distance you'll see a subtle ghost like text on the noise pattern. It says "this is a ghost font".
jofzar·قبل 3 ساعات
You can generate your own video at the top
mort96·قبل 3 ساعات
But... neither of the videos say "this is a ghost font"? Are you sure you are a human?
bmelton·قبل 3 ساعات
and I cannot

(so either I am AI at a level less than Opus 4.8 or just all-round defective as a human)
rzzzt·قبل 3 ساعات
Related work (all involve noise and flickering images, photosensitive eyes/brains beware):

- "This game disappears if you pause it": https://youtu.be/Bg3RAI8uyVw

- "Illusion: If You Pause, The Image Will Disappear": https://youtu.be/ZqGfb_Vlrig
cadamsdotcom·قبل 3 ساعات
Hahaha one of the comments:

“Not just image. The sound also disappears when you pause”

Brilliant :)
arvyy·قبل ساعة واحدة
it's a very old idea. I first saw this on https://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=56
rsanek·قبل 29 دقيقة
I see tons of confustion in the comments on whether AI can or can't read it. Bit of a marketing miss -- they should have picked clearly different decoy vs. default actual messages.
xlii·قبل 3 ساعات
Technically it's not a font, because font needs to be still. Analogy: if I took photo after book was closed would we say that font cannot be read by a camera?

Took a picture (only a single frame) and a 1s movie and threw it toward GPT 5.6 Sol (High):

Frame took 9m30s to decyper and GPT 5.6, it returned: WRITTEN IN GHOST FONT. Weird because I can only see "GHOST FONT" on the demo... but extracted data from image (I saw the highlited one) definitely looks like the "Ghost Font".

--

Video is more amusing, because after 3m GPT 5.6 figured it's motion-defined and asked to run QuickTime. At one moment I got:

> The animation is a motion-defined illusion. I’ve confirmed there’s no readable static OCR layer; I’m decoding its optical-flow field so the letter shapes become explicit.

At 4m it got extracted motion image that was in shape of letters but analyzed for 9 more letters and returned (at 13m36s) "GHOST FONT"

--

So:

    a font...             - FALSE - not a font, but video effect
    ...humans can read... - FALSE - I can't read it from image (but AI can!)
    ...but AI cannot      - FALSE - it can
:D

Edit: https://imgur.com/a/SHlGu4O - work-in-progress images
throw310822·قبل 3 ساعات
> it returned: WRITTEN IN GHOST FONT

It's a static decoy message independent from what you type in. You can see it if you take a long exposure pic of the screen (e.g. with your smartphone).
xlii·قبل 3 ساعات
Oh, cool I was wondering how can I get to see that decoy!
arianvanp·قبل 3 ساعات
3/4 of the responses here seem to be Moltbots given they all confidently claim they found the answer but it's all not correct
pluc·قبل ساعة واحدة
That's... not a font? That's a generated animated image/video?

"A computer font or digital font is a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs"

so it's not a font, humans can't read it and AI can.
solidasparagus·قبل 3 ساعات
When I gave Fable a screenshot it found the GHOST portion of GHOST FONT. Based on pixel density via some python code apparently - https://imgur.com/a/m3c801F
edent·قبل 3 ساعات
I had thought to use homographs. Sadly, all the models I tried were able to decode something like:

"フㄖ乇ㄚ ᗪㄖ乇丂几'ㄒ 丂卄卂尺乇 千ㄖㄖᗪ"

However, I have noticed that voice assistants have a hard time understanding homonyms. Saying "bow" (as in to bow one's head) is often stored as "bow" (as in a bow and arrow). I wonder if there's a sufficiently complex sentence which is intelligible to humans but not to machines?
throwaway219450·قبل 3 ساعات
I haven’t tried, but it looks like you could trivially solve with optical flow?

Edit: looks like yes, from the shared chats people are posting. But it’s interesting to think of communication schemes that require a temporal component so any single image is unreadable and can’t be beaten by long exposures or other tricks (otherwise persistence of vision displays would satisfy). A sort of physical anti copy/paste.
gunapologist99·قبل ساعتين
The answers here seem to establish that some frontier models can read it sometimes, but only after tremendous compute.

That still makes it (well, a future version) potentially useful as a captcha if we hate our users but hate AI more.
bmicraft·قبل ساعتين
Every single on of those answers I've seen _says_ they did decode it, but each and every one of them only found the decoy message without even realizing it.
Findecanor·قبل 3 ساعات
It has bugs with long words: I typed "MARRY AND REPRODUCE". That was the only try that got the last word on a single line, but with too much space between U and C.

If the string is empty, I can read "WRITTEN IN GHOST FONT" very faintly. I'm guessing that is a watermark Edit: Ah, it's decoy text. Of course.
tentacleuno·قبل 3 ساعات
An interesting experiment. I suppose that if you make things like CAPTCHAs too hard to do, we'd end up struggling as well. I can't imagine Ghost Font would be a good fit.
voodooEntity·قبل 3 ساعات
One side i really like it - i also love to play around with funny ideas - but have to say if i would read more than like 2 sentences with that font i'd throw up xD
zikero·قبل 3 ساعات
related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45284311
kevincox·قبل 3 ساعات
It reminds me of https://silverspaceship.com/static/
ealexhudson·قبل 3 ساعات
Sadly another shot in the arms race that captchas started which just leads to increased inaccessibility.

It's interesting work for sure, but the end goal of separating out AI versus human consumers is tough. Indeed, if there was a lasting solution, that would be a substantial discovery that would quickly become very famous...
throw1234567891·قبل 3 ساعات
I cannot read it. Maybe I am AI.
blooalien·قبل 3 ساعات
> "I cannot read it. Maybe I am AI."

I found the bot living in a simulation!

What do I win? Where's my prize?
fecal_henge·قبل 3 ساعات
I cannot read that text.
sscaryterry·قبل 3 ساعات
Security through obscurity is not security :)
casey2·قبل 59 دقيقة
I'm pretty sure there is some compression pipeline that gives you a mask for every frame.

Also

https://www.google.com/search?q=DIS+Optical+Flow
not-a-llm·قبل 3 ساعات
> humans can read

strong statement, I struggle to read it
cynicalsecurity·قبل ساعتين
Old people and bad vision people firewall. This will violate disability accessibility requirements.
Haranrk·قبل ساعتين
This is really cool!
Tiberium·قبل 3 ساعات
5.6 Sol (medium) in Codex read it in 2 minutes, and only because it didn't know how it was hidden beforehand. The agent can just save the script to reuse the next time. I hope people properly test such extraordinary claims before posting this.
stavros·قبل 3 ساعات
Isn't this triviaklu defeatable by taking the diff between two frames and marking changed pixels white and unchanged black?
sylware·قبل 3 ساعات
You can also write using sound based/compressed 'text message' dialect: unless a real human is reading, automated watching tool should have a hard time (until coded/ML-ed on such dialects I guess)
exe34·قبل 3 ساعات
I'm colourblind and this was very difficult to read. If it's the directions to the resistance hq, I'd put in the effort. If it's the manifesto, I just wouldn't read it.
gschizas·قبل 3 ساعات
How is it being colorblind affect it? The video is literally black and white only.
exe34·قبل 6 دقائق
I assumed that might be it because that's why I usually struggle with novelty visual stuff, but you're right, it's probably not colour blindness.
not-a-llm·قبل 3 ساعات
this is black and white, I thought color blindness is only for colors?
Razengan·قبل 3 ساعات
heh although this font can be read by AI as other comments say, it gave me an idea:

How about writing or drawing stuff using optical illusions?

Shapes that not even human eyes can see, but the brain hallucinates: Shapes that seem to appear when you look straight at a pattern, or for a second after you look away from a pattern, or after you close your eyes, etc.

If you take a screenshot or a photo the image would just contain the same static pattern.

i.e. qualia-based "cryptography" :)
sgjohnson·قبل 3 ساعات
"humans can read"

lol. Barely.
dewdgi·قبل 3 ساعات
uuh, what's the point? i mean, models will just be trained to understand it
jdiff·قبل 3 ساعات
Why would they be trained to read a research experiment that fundamentally goes against the way they perceive? They can't train on this technique, they can only postprocess it into a form they can perceive.
plastic-enjoyer·قبل 3 ساعات
I've had the same idea recently, and even set up a similar page to experiment with different speeds and noise types. I've had the idea to set up a message board where the font is basically 'GhostFont'. However, in my experiments, I've noticed that the biggest issue is that this only works for larger font sizes. If the text is as small as, for example, on HackerNews, it will become borderline unreadable.

Furthermore, if AI can read this or not depends on how the text sequence is pre-processed. If AI only gets snapshots of the text, it will probably fail in decoding the text as every snapshot contains only white noise and such no information. However, if we calculate the Deltas between the animation frames, the text will become decodable by an AI, you probably don't even need LLMs or CNNs for this.
shalom1112·قبل 3 ساعات
jackdoe·قبل 3 ساعات
yet
arianvanp·قبل 3 ساعات
"find out with opencv what the hidden message is."

Skill issue on promoter side.

Fable oneshotted it for me.

""" Reveal a motion-camouflaged message hidden in video noise.

How it works: The background noise scrolls vertically at a constant rate (a few px/frame), while the noise inside the letters does not follow that motion. Any single frame looks like pure static. The decode is:

    1. Estimate the background's global motion between consecutive frames
       with phase correlation (this is the "optical flow" step - the motion
       is a pure translation, so one global vector suffices).
    2. Motion-compensate: shift frame t+1 back by that vector so the
       background lines up with frame t.
    3. Take the absolute difference. The background cancels almost
       perfectly; the letters (which don't move with the background)
       light up.
    4. Average the residual over a SHORT window of consecutive frame pairs
       (long windows smear the letters, because the text itself drifts
       slowly over time), blur lightly, and threshold with Otsu.
Usage: python reveal_hidden_message.py input.mp4 [output.png] """

import sys import cv2 import numpy as np

PAIRS = 5 # number of consecutive frame pairs to average (keep small!) BLUR_SIGMA = 6 # spatial blur of each residual, in pixels START_FRAME = 0 # where in the video to start

def load_gray_frames(path, count): cap = cv2.VideoCapture(path) frames = [] while len(frames) < count: ok, frame = cap.read() if not ok: break frames.append(cv2.cvtColor(frame, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY).astype(np.float32)) cap.release() if len(frames) < 2: raise SystemExit("Could not read enough frames from the video.") return frames

def main(): if len(sys.argv) < 2: raise SystemExit(__doc__) src = sys.argv[1] dst = sys.argv[2] if len(sys.argv) > 2 else "revealed_message.png"

    frames = load_gray_frames(src, START_FRAME + PAIRS + 1)
    h, w = frames[0].shape
    acc = np.zeros((h, w), np.float32)

    for i in range(START_FRAME, START_FRAME + PAIRS):
        a, b = frames[i], frames[i + 1]

        # 1) global background motion between the two frames
        (dx, dy), response = cv2.phaseCorrelate(a, b)
        dxi, dyi = int(round(dx)), int(round(dy))
        print(f"pair {i}: background shift = ({dx:+.2f}, {dy:+.2f}) px, "
              f"response = {response:.2f}")

        # 2) motion-compensate frame b by integer (dxi, dyi), then
        # 3) residual = |a - b_shifted| on the overlapping region
        ys = slice(max(0, -dyi), min(h, h - dyi))
        xs = slice(max(0, -dxi), min(w, w - dxi))
        ysb = slice(max(0, dyi), min(h, h + dyi) if dyi < 0 else h)
        # simpler: crop both to the common overlap
        a_ov = a[max(0, -dyi):h - max(0, dyi), max(0, -dxi):w - max(0, dxi)]
        b_ov = b[max(0, dyi):h - max(0, -dyi), max(0, dxi):w - max(0, -dxi)]
        resid = cv2.GaussianBlur(np.abs(a_ov - b_ov), (0, 0), BLUR_SIGMA)
        acc[:resid.shape[0], :resid.shape[1]] += resid

    # 4) normalize + Otsu threshold + light cleanup
    u8 = cv2.normalize(acc, None, 0, 255, cv2.NORM_MINMAX).astype(np.uint8)
    _, mask = cv2.threshold(u8, 0, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY + cv2.THRESH_OTSU)
    kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_ELLIPSE, (5, 5))
    mask = cv2.morphologyEx(mask, cv2.MORPH_CLOSE, kernel)

    out = 255 - mask  # black text on white
    cv2.imwrite(dst, out)
    print(f"wrote {dst}")

    # optional: OCR if pytesseract is installed
    try:
        import pytesseract
        text = pytesseract.image_to_string(out, config="--psm 6").strip()
        print("OCR result:\n" + text)
    except ImportError:
        pass

if __name__ == "__main__": main()
senfiaj·قبل 3 ساعات
No, it can https://chatgpt.com/share/6a521e9b-c754-83ed-9d8e-cf653894eb...
gschizas·قبل 3 ساعات
That's the decoy message :)
senfiaj·قبل ساعتين
Ah, sorry, yes, tried with a very different message. But it can still read when telling that the text is formed by movement. AI doesn't see the world the way we do, so it's understandable. https://chatgpt.com/share/6a522660-929c-83eb-91ff-66b7873420...
arianvanp·قبل 3 ساعات
That is not the message. Did you read the article.
senfiaj·قبل 3 ساعات
I downloaded the message video, renamed it to test.mp4

Still could read https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5221f0-e3fc-83eb-bc15-74420002b6...
bmicraft·قبل ساعة واحدة
That's not the message
senfiaj·قبل 3 ساعات
I gave him this video file https://streamable.com/1bxxyf
huflungdung·قبل 3 ساعات