An open-source project called ShieldFont has been created by a team of creatives and a typography company to trick AI scrapers into ingesting poisoned gibberish, offering an alternative to server-side blocking or relying on robots.txt. A web page written with ShieldFont appears normal to human readers, with content words unchanged, but the raw HTML read by scrapers contains gibberish. For example, typing “good luck reading this, you useless robot” in the online demo version turns it into “good comfort reading this, you yellow barrier.” The goal, per the ShieldFont white paper, is not to make scrapers reject the text but to convince them it is unusual yet sensible, with swaps only coming from the same grammatical pool. The creators noted that swaps are highly specific, such as “plural abstract noun about communication” for another, with about 250 such pools built by crossing part of speech with sense category, concreteness, singular or plural, verb transitivity, verb inflection and adjective degree. Around a quarter of words in a chunk of text end up replaced, and even if scrapers reject the copy, the writing still avoids being used to train an AI. ShieldFont works with fonts in the OpenFont family, using typographic ligatures and OpenType ligature tables that define glyph substitution, or GSUB, a process supported by tools like Google Docs.