What is it?

Symbol Swap is a simple Android app that lets you replace letters in your text with similar symbols. The text should still stay human-readable. But it should get more difficult for algorithms and AI tools to understand the meaning of the text. It should mess with ranking algorithms or AI analyzers if you want to confuse them.

How does it work?

Symbol Swap takes input text and swaps letters with similar symbols (confusables) that should still keep text humanly readable but should be harder to parse for algorithms (such as Twitter suppressing algorithm) or AI scraping tools (e.g. stealing your blog post for model training, etc.).

Swap

The input text can be typed manually or inserted through the context menu on selected text from another application. The input text will be processed when you click on the Swap button. The amount of swapped letters and replacing symbols can be set by the user.

If the confusable symbol set contains (can be set by the user) more symbols then only one symbol will be selected per letter randomly.

Settings

Settings screens allow you to customize parameters for swapping.

Probability of swap

You can set the probability of swapping the letter with a confusable symbol. It introduces some randomization to avoid introducing any human patterns to the swaps. While setting probability to 0 will not swap any letter, setting it to 100 will swap every letter in the text (every letter in the defined Latin alphabet). The value can be set in the range of 0-100.

Highlight swapped symbols

If enabled the app will highlight all swapped symbols with a light green background. It helps to detect and recheck the final result before publishing the text or sending it as a message via other messenger applications.

Use own whitelist

If enabled it allows you to select a set of confusable symbols that will be used for swapping. If you deselect all confusables then no letter will be swapped.
If disabled it will use all defined confusables and it will select any confusable randomly per letter (each letter occurrence is evaluated individually and can be swapped with different confusable).

Share

The share button allows you to easily send the processed text (with swapped letters) to another application or copy & paste it elsewhere.

tl;dr

Fun text editting app to mess with ranking algos an AI

Conclusion

It is a fun app made after Twitter hid some of my tweets based on the content. I tried the processed text with swapped symbols with AI chats to test how it can be processed and understood. The result is that some symbols are actually understandable but if we use the right symbols (should be tuned) it can get lost easily.

It might be worthy to prepare pre-defined confusable sets for AI confusion or to group similar fonts for the next releases. Algorithms may solve this issue soon. But for now, we can make it harder for them with this simple technique and have some fun. So let's have some fun!