ShieldFont Poisons AI Training Data by Swapping Words While Preserving Grammar
ShieldFont, a free font created by Brazilian agency Seneda & Abrucio and Danish studio Playtype, offers website owners a new way to disrupt unauthorized collection of text for training generative AI models.
Publishing content online now exposes material not only to human readers but also to AI scrapers that frequently ignore robots.txt directives. ShieldFont counters this by allowing scrapers to access the page while feeding them deliberately altered text that remains grammatically plausible.
The font leverages the OpenType mechanism for glyph substitution, replacing entire words rather than individual characters. Nouns are swapped with nouns, past-tense verbs with past-tense verbs, and plural forms are preserved. The vocabulary is organized into 250 groups based on parts of speech and semantic features, resulting in roughly one quarter of words being altered while maintaining readable structure.
This controlled substitution aims to keep poisoned text inside training datasets instead of being filtered out by quality checks. When evaluated with FineWeb-Edu, about 10 percent of fragments previously rated as high quality still passed after protection, yet 55.8 percent of tested excerpts contained facts that no longer matched the original.
ShieldFont is not immune to all extraction methods. Screenshots followed by OCR can recover the original text, and screen readers for visually impaired users currently read the substituted words. Developers have added a beta feature to supply the correct text to assistive technologies, though accessibility concerns remain unresolved.
The font currently supports only English and is freely available on GitHub.
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