AI Can’t Read This Trippy ‘Ghost Font’

The folks behind MixFont, an AI-powered typography generator, have ironically created a “font” that only humans can read. Called Ghost Font, the experimental system uses moving dots to create the illusion of letters, allowing your eyes to pick up on words and phrases that AI can’t.

Those moving dots are, of course, part of a video, not static pages. For that reason, it’s not really fair to call Ghost Font an actual font; you can’t use it in a Word document or Google Doc, and when you pause the video, you see only random visual noise without any recognizable characters. That’s why the image above looks like nonsense, but if you click here, you can try the “font” for yourself.

The trick is motion. Ghost Font uses each letter as a pattern of upward-moving dots, while the dots in the background move downward. Human vision tracks these motion patterns and then fills in the resulting shapes. AI systems, on the other hand, treat video as a stack of individual frames, preventing them from detecting this motion pattern. Your favorite chatbot will therefore hallucinate incorrect text or report back that it only sees “TV static,” like in this test from Tom’s Guide.

Ghost Font is more about hiding information visually than providing real security. It lets you hide short messages from simple scraping tools while keeping them readable for people. That said, even for humans, it’s hard to view longer texts. Even a sentence would be a bit difficult and uncomfortable to decipher.

Ghost Font’s efficacy could also fade as large language models (LLMs) become more sophisticated. Experts say that specialized computer vision methods can recognize Ghost Font by analyzing motion, and future video models might learn to read it well if they see enough examples.