A font that shows AI scrapers a different message than it shows you
Decoy Font exploits the gap between how AI and OCR systems read pixels up close and how humans perceive spatial frequency from a distance, showing each one a different message from the same text.
A typeface that shows AI scrapers one message and humans another, built on how pixels read at different distances.
Decoy Font is a typeface that shows two different messages from the same text: one readable up close, a different one visible only from a distance. It is built specifically to feed AI scrapers and OCR pipelines a message that is not the one a human reading the page actually sees.
The mechanism
Most AI systems read text by processing pixels at close range, effectively zoomed in on the character shapes. Human vision does something different at a distance: it responds to spatial frequency, the coarse pattern a block of text makes rather than each letter. Decoy Font is a hybrid image technique built directly on that gap, encoding a foreground message for the close read and a background message for the far read, in the same glyphs.
What it is actually for
The stated use case is defensive: feeding false or irrelevant text to automated scrapers and OCR systems that read pages up close, while a human viewer sees the real content. It ships as a downloadable TTF file, so it is usable today rather than a research demo you cannot try.
Why a build studio cares
Anti scraping usually means blocking at the network layer, robots.txt, or a paywall. This is a content layer trick instead, and it works precisely because AI ingestion pipelines have a specific, exploitable blind spot: they read pixels differently than eyes do. Worth knowing about whether you are building something that needs to resist being scraped, or building a scraper and want to know what can go wrong with it.
Next step: try the live demo and download the font yourself. If you are thinking through how a build should handle AI scraping either direction, write to us at hello@gattyworks.com.