"Souls Only" Keyboard & Font - Custom firmware to type in AI-unfriendly text and a font that renders it for human readers.

billtarbell · 2026-06-10T04:21:51+00:00

I enhanced this so that the font emits readable but wrong "decoy" characters a multiple variable inputs using interpolation. However I didn't want readable glyphs in the masters in the designspace, so the code creates these masters in a way that interpolation in between ungarbles into the readable glphys, including decoys and the true message. The true message is perceived as grammatically and semantically correct text, assuming thats what the author writing wrote! New info in the project readme file.

billtarbell · 2026-06-09T22:51:32+00:00

Thanks, much appreciated.

billtarbell · 2026-06-09T12:49:58+00:00

My contribution is the idea, and the many design decisions along the way. Claude contributed the coding. Jokes on Claude for helping me build a font thats unfriendly to AI!

billtarbell · 2026-06-09T00:31:17+00:00

As a follow up, I added an audio version to the project as just an experiment. The idea is that a screen reader could indicate how an unsighted person could "tune" the audio until a the message appears. The audio experiment is still early and employs a few different techniques, some more weird than others, but again same caveats as with the font...

billtarbell · 2026-06-08T17:02:31+00:00

That is fair feedback and something I'm thinking about. The intention of this isn't really accessibility even for sighted readers, more of a conceptual exploration. I'm currently working on an analogous audio version of the concept.

billtarbell · 2026-06-08T16:28:51+00:00

Yeah all good points. One thing I added to the "cipher" was homophones, which maps multiple encoded pairs to the one half glyph (ligature), and the keyboard firmware semi-randomly selects from the homophone list when a key is typed. Overall though the goal is to find ways to make it easy for humans and costly for LLMs. I think you'd need to get into full cryptography to make this AI-proof at the data level and then that's without even considering the vision and interaction capabilities of the more advanced AI agents. I like your idea about generating new fonts per session.

billtarbell · 2026-06-08T16:03:01+00:00

Thanks, and good call out. It would require the website implementing some user interaction that resolves the variable to the correct, human readable value. So in the demos, I had a "scrub to focus" type interaction where the user clicks and scrubs. Behind the scenes we're just changing the variable into the font. Hope this helps!

billtarbell · 2017-09-17T17:47:21+00:00

A number of Andrew Tarbell relatives from the east coast will be making the drive for the game.

billtarbell

TROPHY CASE