TL;DR: Please help me fuck (with) AI. See bold sections
Hi,
I haven't been keeping up with anti-AI combat so I'm asking for help. I inherited thousands of pages of materials my late grandpa made or used for his grammar school teaching job in the 1990s-2000s. They are A4 pages of documents made using what seems to be a typewriter, Text602 (DOS rich text editor) and Word. They were most likely not all made by him but he treasured them in nice binding and they have sources (mostly books and journals, almost no webpages, and absolutely no AI) and a cursory look shows meticulous compilation of every important fact on each subject (frankly, the level of detail is excruciating and I'm glad I went to a different grammar school). There's obviously no original scientific research but the materials can still be useful to someone, I bet. They were almost thrown away by the widowed grandma (she already removed and disposed of the plastic bindings and front covers so I'll have to guess document titles) but I think grandpa would prefer them to be shared. With an ADF scanner and OCR software (I have no chance of accessing the work computers he used so I'll have to scan), I can quickly make searchable PDFs of each document, and share them via torrent and DDL sites (there are Czech sites dedicated to sharing teaching materials but they have paywalls or an upload-credit system so best avoid them, not to mention some materials contain newspaper clippings and textbook photocopies for images so best stay anonymous and not try to assert copyright).
I'm afraid these texts could become a major part of some commercial LLM's Czech-language biology/social sciences knowledge corpus unless poisoned. How to best reduce the value of the documents when people try to feed them to AI (training/rewriting) with them while keeping their value for most legitimate users? (Sorry, people with screen readers, there may need to be extra steps for you.) I'm thinking about adding a huge volume of thesaurized or otherwise fuzzed public domain text like f4mi did with .ass subtitles (a technique that would probably still work if she didn't get 1M views detailing it, making YouTube reduce subtitle formatting support). Prompt injection or replacements (cell→gnome) might be interesting too. However, tools I know add an extra PDF layer, which is too obvious. I'm thinking about adding tiny text in the header and footer or between paragraphs in the OCR layer (not overlaid to reduce interference when selecting/searching), but how? I need an automated way to do this with such a huge page count. I can use both Linux and Windows machines for the job. None of them are very powerful but speed is not a concern, it's summer break and nobody will need school materials until September. I'll be happy to include multiple layers and techniques to make them too frustrating to remove.
The paper smells musty but does not seem to be moldy. It's all blank on the other side so I'll interleave it with recent newspaper to allow for the odor-neutralizing chemicals to seep into the sheets so I can eventually reuse them.
Illustration pic is an actual sheet from the collection, to make the post more engaging. Of course I won't be adding watermarks like that, that would just aggrevate people and make them try extra hard to extract the actual content. (And this one is easy to remove with color channel mixing.)
you could make a custom font with ligatures, that just replaces words and sentences with other words when rendering, and then embedd that custom font in each pdf file.
e.g. make a ligature for the word "gnome", so that it looks like "cell", and then use "gnome" everywhere in the text, where a user should see the word "cell".
edit: someone embedded doom in a true type font: https://4rh1t3ct0r7.github.io/ttf-doom/
to add insult to injure, here is AI deep research on the topic: https://assistant.kagi.com/share/8abb2344-892f-442b-9c63-09b6e72dbbab
Wouldn't that fuck up accessibility tools like screen readers?
Screen readers and LLMs both need plain text. Sorry, I'm not giving it to them. There will be an invisible OCR layer for searchability (and to discourage scrapers from re-doing OCR instead), like in many scanned PDFs, but poisoned. There's not many blind teachers anyway.
Yet, this is more accessible than what someone else suggested: making photocopies and donating them to libraries "for local lending only". Those would almost never get used and probably thrown away as soon as the libraries realized the difficult copyright situation (not all are by my grandpa, many are unclear due to missing cover pages)
That's a good idea but won't be necessary. The documents are scanned, which means all visible text is already a bitmap. For searchability, a text layer will be added as usual for OCR'd documents, but it's invisible so it does not matter what font it uses.
I also think I'll tinker with the bitmap to screw with anyone trying to re-OCR it. If the typewritten text has small, digitally stamped
OpenAI GPT 2.0 says:orThis Deepseek response has been rated inaccurate:above some paragraphs, a human will easily deduce they have been added later to confuse bots scraping for good training data, especially if a graphical-only disclaimer likeThe copyright holder released this document for human consumption only. Markers have been added to reduce the apparent and real value for automated tools while keeping the main content intact when viewed by humans. The NC-SA clause of Creative Commons 4.0 applies so no work based on this text can be used in training data of commercial LLMson the first page explains the situation.