Frequently Asked Questions

Should you worry that your content – books, research data, training manuals, professional journals – has been swallowed up by an AI. Yes. And you’re losing money as a result with lower subscriptions, royalties and click rates. That’s where Parsifer comes in. Our platform equips content owners – publishers, authors, artists in all content forms – with a radically innovative solution to identify unauthorized use of their work in AIs and provide evidence to enforce their rights and monetize their (IP).

1. What’s Parsifer about?

Parsifer equips content creators to thrive in a world of AI risk. And by risk, we mean the widespread theft of copyrighted IP by AIs rampaging across the Internet. Our solution is a revolutionary yet easy-to-use digital service for content creators and owners that identifies whether their IP is being used by an AI.

We offer three things to our customers:

1. An independent source of truth about the use of content by AIs.

2. A unique, proprietary methodology that interprets AI output.

3. Provides easy-to-follow analytics/evidence to take action to enforce content rights.

Parsifer is an empowering technology, providing IP creators with hard data on how their work is reflected in AI systems.

2.Is the situation that urgent regarding AI exploitation of content?

AI systems – specifically, Large Language Models (LLMs) – have been built, or trained, on digital content from the Internet. Put bluntly: LLMs have pretty much swallowed up all forms of digital content, including IP under copyright and behind paywalls.

Many AI companies still, remarkably, claim they do not violate copyright laws in acquiring their training content, either buying or licensing it, or relying on the fair use principle. Believe that if you like (but don’t). They also claim that they can’t track the content they use or pinpoint its source. It’s highly probable your work has been swallowed, either taken in directly by an LLM or acquired from a pirate website somewhere offshore.

Parsifer provides verifiable insight – hard evidence – to determine whether your work has been uploaded into an LLM – or multiple LLMs.

3. Why is Parsifer important for content-driven businesses?

It’s pretty simple: the unauthorized appropriation of your content degrades your ability to monetize it.

To make matters worse, the AI processing of your work – stripping it of identifying markers and chopping it up in ways not intended – often results in misrepresenting your creative intent, causing reputational and brand damage, not to mention annoying the hell out of you.

This is basically a multi-billion revenue grab by AI companies in violation of your rights and ability to make a living from your creative output.

4. You appear to see American innovation in AI as the enemy?

AI has many great uses and millions of people and businesses are engaging today with LLM models to improve productivity, to learn, to make their lives better. Like many technologies, AI is neither good nor bad, but the way it’s used can be either.

Parsifer believes that creators have the right to determine how their content is used, and that AI systems must respect that right. Most AI systems don’t provide transparency with respect to the data they use or acknowledge their sources in response to prompts. These are troubling indicators of what’s to come.

By now we have all seen how tech innovation has impacted the music industry and journalism, completely disrupting their revenue models. So, it’s natural – no, it’s essential – to be concerned with what’s happening today in the AI sector.

Consider the white papers for AI regulation recently submitted to the U.S. government by the most prominent AI companies. Draped in the logic of national security, AI companies argue that copyright laws should evolve to ensure that AI systems have more or less free access to all content scraped off the Internet, with very little consideration to how this will affect the economic realities of content creators.

It's as if your content exists only for AI commercialization with zero respect for the voices that created that content over so many generations. In contrast, we believe content creators should be fairly compensated for their work?

5. Parsifer is a curious name, what’s behind it?

Parsifer is a combination of Parsing and Inference, which speaks to how the technology works and how tech people think. We parse arguments or data, say, breaking down ideas or concepts into components for analytical purposes, which is where inference comes in, the interpretative act in an evaluation process. More fun to consider is that our name was inspired by the medieval tale of Parsifal, the knight searching for the Holy Grail. Parsifal is basically the OG Knight in Shining Armor, a protector. That’s kind of how we view our purpose in serving content creators and culture makers, providing them with new solutions to protect and monetize their work.

6.    How does Parsifer work?

The Parsifer solution, accessed using an SaaS platform, starts by analyzing a sample of your work to generate a digital “fingerprint” of its characteristics: your unique DNA as a creator. We take that fingerprint and create a prompt to query an LLM, all towards generating a second fingerprint from the response of that LLM that either matches yours or doesn’t. Think of this process as a digital equivalent of dusting a crime scene for fingerprints. Parsifer uses a four-step process to determine whether an AI system is using specific source content:

1. Source content is fed into Parsifer, from which it generates a semantic fingerprint (FP#1) featuring metadata qualities that represent the source content.

2. A prompt is then submitted to an LLM using the metadata elements from that fingerprint.

3. The LLM model output is fed into Parsifer from which it generates a second semantic fingerprint (FP#2).

4. The two fingerprints, FP#1 and FP#2 are compared, yielding a probability assessment — or analytics — that the specific source content has been used.