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.)
Look into Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
also https://git.madhouse-project.org/algernon/iocaine
This is at the crawler level.
In terms of protection,
OCR is a bad idea in that case.
If you've ever done OCR, you know how it works.
I've been musing on how to mess with OCR. That's the core tech for docs that are not pure text (like an image/scan).
I haven't tested it, but you can probably find some research.
Why OCR Struggles With Multi-Column Pages https://webfonts.tech/why-ocr-struggles-with-multi-column-pages
My idea is to use more text columns AND vary the columns from page to page, or even on the same page (half and half). One page has 3 columns, another has 2, another has 4 etc. Get creative and random.
If you can narrow the gap between columns, or make it more human-readable only, that would be an even bigger problem for OCR.
In this context, don't forget to use "justified" and hyphenation for the last words on the line (aka CORRECT grammar and syntax.) That can add extra chaos for the machine.
The thing is, if I don't add a "good enough for searching" OCR layer, someone else will - AI scraper or legitimate user. That's a cheap automatic operation. I'll better do it myself and poison it in a way that won't interfere with searching, like replacing some "are" with "aren't", such common words are rarely searched for. If there's a chance AI will fall for the metadata and invisible layer contents, that will decrease the requirements for visible poisoning, which is necessary but annoying.
Some of the text is indeed justified so I could do the multi-column trick that seems like the best compromise. The gap can be as narrow as one space. Or larger if I can write a script to detect lines and connect the columns with gibberish. A human can use zoom or window positioning to view one column at a time. I don't and will never have access to files the printouts are from (some are presumably in
.602format, others probably.doc), others are handwritten or typewritten, some have images glued on top or hand-traced; and Czech OCR is only about 99.5% reliable so as easier as it would make the endeavor, I can't be sure to preserve everything if I try to convert them into editable documents as an in-between step.