Big AI's content problem: Take the work, keep the money
Its companies must ingest other people’s work. You know, books, news stories, photographs, code, websites, that one original meme you came up with, and practically everything else on the internet to train its large language models (LLMs). We also know that AI companies hate paying for any of it, obeying the licenses attached to it, or, God forbid, sharing their revenue with the companies and people who created the work in the first place.
- ▪Its companies must ingest other people’s work.
- ▪You know, books, news stories, photographs, code, websites, that one original meme you came up with, and practically everything else on the internet to train its large language models (LLMs).
- ▪We also know that AI companies hate paying for any of it, obeying the licenses attached to it, or, God forbid, sharing their revenue with the companies and people who created the work in the first place.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/09/27/big-ais-content-problem-take-the-work-keep-the-money/5299007 |
| Publication time | Sun, 27 Sep 2026 11:35:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-27T09:35:41.116Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-27T09:35:41.116Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | xjmQH9h6x4Zd · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); columnists Big AI's content problem: Take the work, keep the money OPINION The more we learn about how AI does business, the more unfair it looks Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols Steven J.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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