Comment by Hendrikto
6 days ago
Funny, for me it is exactly the opposite: I can read the actual text very easily, but the “Written in Ghost Text” is barely perceptible to the point I would have completely missed it, if it were not for the comment pointing it out here.
I've just tried it on my large desktop monitor (roughly 1440p, not HiDPI), and I now see "Ghost Font" extremely clearly and can't see the decoy at all. If I scale my browser window to 30% zoom, then I can just see the "Written In Ghost Text" decoy message again.
My phone would have been zooming out the browser window, and making the dots even tinier, but the phone is HiDPI so it would have still preserved the dots. My eyes are middle-aged and probably starting to do the same kind of median-blur effect that models do when they resize an image. That's my current guess for why I can see the decoy more clearly on mobile.
If that's the case, then this trick will stop working as vision models approach pixel-perfect vision, instead of the current resizing that they do. Pretty cool as steganography though.
Flipping my phone between portrait and landscape thereby changing image size is enough to determine which message is legible to me.
That would confirm that this is more related to algorithmic filters than human perception.
On my mediocre laptop display, I had to set the brightness moderately, and take my glasses off to see the decoy text more easily (easier than squinting). Deleting the custom text also made it easier. The other tip someone posted about moving the window around also helps a lot. Moving further back from the display also helps.
Same. If I move the window around, I can perceive the "Written in Ghost Text"... Otherwise, not at all.
Same, I had no sense of the decoy message at all until I read that comment.