Everyone is ripping off someone's content.
And just to be accurate here, SO content is creative commons (created by the community). Are those just cheap words?
These add significant value to the original content IMO
However most of the time that I and most people come across SO it's the top search hit for a technical question. The answers are seldom unique, but instead are usually pulled almost word for word from the online manual for the same.
That is overwhelmingly the value of SO -- it benefits by collecting aggregated content from all over the web. It is, hilariously, by design exactly what many in here are complaining about. In that case instead of an automated process it's a mechanical turk.
Hey I don't care because it gets me my answer, but I can see the hilarious paradox in some of the complaints.
I was once searching on a problem -- one that I had faced years earlier but had then forgotten -- and the top link was a SO QA. The answer sounded oddly familiar, when I remembered that it was actually from a blog entry I had posted two years prior.
In my experience though the sites that are taking the content are ad ridden messes which remove value rather than add anything.
Maybe it's like that in your field, but in Mac dev questions you're fairly likely to get answers from established OS X developers, and even Apple employees.