I pasted a screenshot of the default text ("GHOST FONT") into ChatGPT 5.6 Sol, told it to read it, and without further instruction it chewed on it for awhile before coming back with:

  WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS
  STAYS IN VEGAS

Claude Opus 4.8 can read it with a single prompt and no instructions on how to read it.

https://ibb.co/WWMSXQkQ

Took me a long time to realise that "Written In Ghost Text" wasn't actually the text I was meant to be reading, and that was only the decoy message.

I can barely read the actual message, and it's about as "readable" to me as the Magic Eye 3D pictures. Actually I think I have a headache from looking at it on a mobile screen.

As a research idea it's cool though. But I do wonder if/when AI models will figure out how to decode it - I imagine a bit of additional prompting would get them there.

Humans can read it, but with difficulty. If it becomes important, AI can be taught to read it.

So...usefulness?

When I gave Fable a screenshot it found the GHOST portion of GHOST FONT. Based on pixel density via some python code apparently - https://imgur.com/a/m3c801F

Related work (all involve noise and flickering images, photosensitive eyes/brains beware):

- "This game disappears if you pause it": https://youtu.be/Bg3RAI8uyVw

- "Illusion: If You Pause, The Image Will Disappear": https://youtu.be/ZqGfb_Vlrig

It splits long words but it does not always work well. I typed "MARRY AND REPRODUCE" and got the last word on one line but with too much space between U and C.

If the string is empty, I can read "WRITTEN IN GHOST FONT" very faintly. I'm guessing that is a watermark in every image, too difficult to see when there is other text.

An interesting experiment. I suppose that if you make things like CAPTCHAs too hard to do, we'd end up struggling as well. I can't imagine Ghost Font would be a good fit.

One side i really like it - i also love to play around with funny ideas - but have to say if i would read more than like 2 sentences with that font i'd throw up xD

related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45284311

I cannot read that text.

Sadly another shot in the arms race that captchas started which just leads to increased inaccessibility.

It's interesting work for sure, but the end goal of separating out AI versus human consumers is tough. Indeed, if there was a lasting solution, that would be a substantial discovery that would quickly become very famous...

You can also write using sound based/compressed 'text message' dialect: unless a real human is reading, automated watching tool should have a hard time (until coded/ML-ed on such dialects I guess)

I'm colourblind and this was very difficult to read. If it's the directions to the resistance hq, I'd put in the effort. If it's the manifesto, I just wouldn't read it.

uuh, what's the point? i mean, models will just be trained to understand it

I've had the same idea recently, and even set up a similar page to experiment with different speeds and noise types. I've had the idea to set up a message board where the font is basically 'GhostFont'. However, in my experiments, I've noticed that the biggest issue is that this only works for larger font sizes. If the text is as small as, for example, on HackerNews, it will become borderline unreadable.

Furthermore, if AI can read this or not depends on how the text sequence is pre-processed. If AI only gets snapshots of the text, it will probably fail in decoding the text as every snapshot contains only white noise and such no information. However, if we calculate the Deltas between the animation frames, the text will become decodable by an AI, you probably don't even need LLMs or CNNs for this.

yet