Designer Eric Lu presented the Ghost Font, an innovative font capable of misleading artificial intelligence while keeping texts easily readable for humans.
Ghost Font is an experimental font that forms text messages using thousands of tiny moving dots. Without the clear contours of letters found in regular fonts, Ghost Font remains invisible to many modern AI models that process video as a sequence of static frames. Thus, human perception, capable of recognizing objects through movement, allows for easy reading of hidden messages, while algorithms often fail to recognize them.
This innovation is based on the ability of humans to group moving elements, making words noticeable through animation. When the animation is stopped, the text disappears, leaving only random dots. Some AI models, as developers report, can still adapt to this font if given additional instructions for frame-by-frame analysis or using specialized algorithms.
Despite Ghost Font’s ability to perplex algorithms, Eric Lu states that it is not data protection or encryption. Analyzing a large number of frames and advanced computer vision tools have the potential for decrypting the font’s text.
Here is the response of Google’s Gemini system to the attempt to recognize hidden texts:
| Model | Result |
|---|---|
| Gemini | Unable to recognize text |
The Ghost Font innovation highlights one of the vulnerabilities of artificial intelligence, encouraging developers to improve their models for detecting moving objects.
