You might have this the wrong way around.
It's not the publishers who need to do the hard work, it's the multi-billion dollar investments into training these systems that need to do the hard work.
We are moving to a position whereby if you or I want to download something without compensating the publisher, that's jail time, but if it's Zuck, Bezos or Musk, they get a free pass.
That's the system that needs to change.
I should not have to defend my blog from these businesses. They should be figuring out how to pay me for the value my content adds to their business model. And if they don't want to do that, then they shouldn't get to operate that model, in the same way I don't get to build a whole set of technologies on papers published by Springer Nature without paying them.
This power imbalance is going to be temporary. These trillion-dollar market cap companies think if they just speed run it, they'll become too big, too essential, the law will bend to their fiefdom. But in the long term, it won't - history tells us that concentration of power into monarchies descends over time, and the results aren't pretty. I'm not sure I'll see the guillotine scaffolds going up in Silicon Valley or Seattle in my lifetime, but they'll go up one day unless these companies get a clue from history as to what they need to do.