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Invisible text that AI chatbots understand and humans can’t? Yep, it’s a thing.

A quirk in the Unicode standard harbors an ideal steganographic code channel.

Riley Goodside, an independent researcher and prompt engineer at Scale AI, is widely acknowledged as the person who discovered that when not accompanied by a 🏴, the tags don’t display at all in most user interfaces but can still be understood as text by some LLMs. Last year, he followed online threads discussing the embedding of keywords in white text into job resumes, supposedly to boost applicants’ chances of receiving a follow-up from a potential employer. Looking beyond LLMs, the research surfaces a fascinating revelation I had never encountered in the more than two decades I've followed cybersecurity: Built directly into the ubiquitous Unicode standard is support for a lightweight framework whose only function is to conceal data through steganography, the ancient practice of representing information inside a message or physical object.

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