With artificial intelligence becoming ubiquitous in everyday life applications, from health trackers to dating apps, it's becoming increasingly difficult to know who can access your private messages.
But an American developer has come up with a solution: a new font that artificial intelligence systems cannot easily read, while humans can understand it clearly .
Developer Eric Lo developed a font called "Ghost Font ," a new style of writing that relies on movement rather than traditional static letters.
"Using a combination of movement, video, noise, and deceptive elements, this has become a unique way to share a message with real people," Low explained.
He explained that the script is not a traditional script in the usual sense, but rather a new experience in written communication, designed in a way that makes it more difficult for artificial intelligence systems to understand.
He added: "The letters do not appear as clearly as regular text, but the human eye can read them directly, while even modern artificial intelligence models find it very difficult to decipher their content."
The idea is based on displaying letters through the movement of moving dots . When the video is playing, the human eye can follow the movement of these dots and read the words, but when the video is stopped, the dots turn into overlapping and incomprehensible shapes, making it almost impossible to extract the message from a still image.
Lo explained: "When writing a few words, the letters appear only thanks to the movement of the dots that the human eye can see. When the movement is stopped, the fixed dots become mixed up and it becomes impossible to know the message from a single snapshot, which means that taking a screenshot will not reveal the content."
To enhance protection, Lu added another layer in the form of a deceptive message hidden within the video , intended to mislead AI agents searching for the real message.
He said: "This deceptive message represents an additional trick for intelligent agents, as when searching for hidden content they may find the fake message first and believe it to be the real message."
Lo drew inspiration from the ZXX font designed by designer Sang Moon in 2013, which included four writing styles designed to be readable by humans but difficult for optical character recognition (OCR) software to understand.
"At that time the ZXX font was resistant to monitoring, but with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, modern models have become able to read it easily, so I added the element of movement to overcome the capabilities of current artificial intelligence," said Lu.
To test the effectiveness of the font, Lo showed videos containing messages written in the ghost font to advanced artificial intelligence models, and confirmed that these models had difficulty decoding the animated content.
Lou believes that the ghost font may not be just an artistic experiment, but could find practical uses, especially in CAPTCHA systems used to verify that the user is a human and not a robot.
He said: "Most current CAPTCHA systems are now solvable by artificial intelligence, but relying on motion in the video may make decoding more difficult for robots, while remaining relatively easy for humans."
Despite the technology's current success, Lu acknowledges that its ability to resist artificial intelligence may not last forever, as the development of intelligent models may make overcoming this barrier only a matter of time.
