The web’s newest weapon against AI scrapers is a font
热度趋势
百分比基于当前可用热度信号，而非评论数或独立用户人数。
一种对抗AI抓取器的新方法是使用一种字体，该字体能向人类和机器显示不同的内容。这种技术旨在增加抓取器的成本和复杂性，因为它将要求它们模拟浏览器的渲染管道，而不仅仅是抓取原始HTML。这种预渲染过程的成本可能是简单抓取的五到十三倍，从而显著阻碍大规模抓取操作。创建者希望这个基本思想能激发更多实现，使AI抓取更具挑战性。
A game of scrape and mouse
While ShieldFont pages can still be read perfectly well by average humans, there can be some side effects when using the font on published webpages. Search engines, screen readers, copy/paste tools, and translation software can all get tripped up by the altered HTML, making the page a little less useful to your intended audience.
Tell me more about the very interstate southern engineer with the sofa car…
Credit:
ShieldFont
ShieldFont isn’t a foolproof defense, either. Any page that’s readable by a human could also be correctly interpreted by an AI scraping tool that simply renders the full webpage and uses optical character recognition on an image of the output.
However, that process would require a lot of extra work for scrapers that currently just pull down the raw HTML source code of billions of webpages as plaintext, without going to the trouble of simulating a browser’s rendering pipeline. API costs from third-party scraping tools suggest this kind of pre-rendering would cost anywhere from five to 13 times as much as simply scraping HTML, which would lead to heavy increases in time and expense for scrapers operating at scale.
And it’s that indiscriminate, large-scale scraping that the ShieldFont creators say they’re trying to prevent, or at least slow down. “Our main underlying purpose is to enforce a basic principle of AI ethics: creators should have a meaningful say in whether their work is used to train AI systems,” they write. “Where consent is not respected, technical design can make taking that work without permission less useful and more costly. … Being discoverable does not mean consenting to AI training.”
The creators say they hope other tinkerers will come up with other implementations for the basic idea of “show[ing] one thing for humans, something else for machines.” The more different methods are out there, being used in the wilds of the web, the harder it will be for AI scrapers to learn how to bypass them all.