I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that every single robot is built on the labor, creative and technical knowledge and advancements of the workers that robot replaced. Robots after all, much more than LLMs, are incapable of creative output. Some human (probably a laborer) figured out how to stamp the steel in just the right ways, or how to cut the patterns in just the right ways so that the product could be manufactured. Then a robot company came in and stole that creative output, or more likely was sold that creative output by the company owners who stole/bought (depending on your point of view about labor and the ownership of labor's creative outputs in the current US legal system) to produce a robot that then displaced the laborer who created the process in the first place.
Re:OpenAI Feared "Optics" of what might appear on Hacker News
by parineum on Sunday September 27, 2026 @09:03AM
(#49866340)
Didn't I just read an article about Tesla employees not wanting to train their robot replacements?
Re:OpenAI Feared "Optics" of what might appear on Hacker News
by tpmoney on Sunday September 27, 2026 @10:00PM
(#49872701)
> Robot companies don't appropriate the work of other people.
That's also the key political compromise underlying the notion of copyright: that someone is entitled to the fruits of their labor, and should not be economically hindered by a product that could not have existed without said work. That's the basis on which the "derivative work" copyright doctrine emerged: a work sufficiently original that it does not displace the work on which it is based. LLMs fail to abide by that political compromise by a country mile.