Unicode Steganography
I built a demo of two Unicode steganography techniques, zero-width characters and homoglyph substitution, in the context of AI misalignment. The first is about the use of two invisible zero-width characters (ZWS and ZWNJ) to binary encode text. The second is much cooler. Most characters in the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets look nearly identical, but have different unicode. If you have text to encode and convert it into binary representation (1s and 0s), you could take plain english "carrier" text and for each 1 in the binary representation you could substitute the Cyrillic letter equivalent.…
Unicode Steganography launched on April 7, 2026 with 59 votes, #869 of 21,248 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Unicode Steganography is a demo tool that implements two techniques for hiding text within other text. The first method uses invisible zero-width characters to binary encode messages. The second uses homoglyph substitution, where visually similar Latin and Cyrillic characters are swapped according to binary patterns, allowing hidden messages to be embedded in plain English text. Both techniques are presented in the context of AI misalignment concerns. The tool is designed for those interested in exploring covert communication methods and their security implications.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Interactive demos showing how invisible Unicode characters and visual lookalikes can carry secret messages through ordinary text, and what that means for AI safety and alignment.
How invisible characters and visual lookalikes can carry secret messages through ordinary text, and what that means for LLM safety. A sufficiently capable model could embed covert signals in its outputs, invisible to human readers but recoverable by another model or process. Try it yourself below. Each technique hides data inside normal-looking text, but the tradeoffs around detectability, capacity, and robustness differ. LLM steganography is a concrete example of how AI deception could work in practice. Each of the techniques demonstrated above fools human readers, but none survives a scanner built to look for them: a Unicode category check catches zero-width characters, a homoglyph…from steganography.patrickvuscan.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
I built a demo of two Unicode steganography techniques, zero-width characters and homoglyph substitution, in the context of AI misalignment. The first is about the use of two invisible zero-width characters (ZWS and ZWNJ) to binary encode text. The second is much cooler. Most characters in the Latin and Cyrillic…
Does a similar job
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I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters2018 · github.com · ▲385Replace scary zero-width characters with funny emojis - elchiapp/zero-width-chrome-extension
Stegmoji2025 · chinmay29hub-stegmoji.vercel.app · ▲14Hide secret messages in plain text using invisible Unicode.
A website that makes your text look cool anywhere online using Unicode2025 · fontgenerator.cool · ▲108Generate 180+ copy-and-paste fonts for Instagram, TikTok, Discord, bios, names, and messages. Free fancy text generator with cool, cute, bold, cursive, and symbol styles.
I also created a Chrome Ext that reveals use of zero-width characters2018 · github.com · ▲17A Chrome extension to detect, highlight, and sanitize text with zero-width characters. - roymckenzie/detect-zero-width-characters-chrome-extension
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