A for Effort: How AI Upends Copyright Law

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Last week I stood in front of three tapestries at The Met, each more than fifteen feet tall, and woven from Raphael’s original designs decades after his death. It got me thinking about how AI fundamentally inverts the economic problem copyright law was built to solve.The Raphael: Sublime Poetry exhibit culminates with the replicas of three of Raphael’s famous tapestries and their fascinating story. Soon after his election in 1513, Pope Leo X set Raphael to design a series of ten tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, the Acts of the Apostles, to hang below Michelangelo’s ceiling. Raphael and his workshop spent 1515 and 1516 painting the full-scale cartoons, the working designs, on pasted sheets of paper, detailed enough to be turned into wool, silk, and metal thread. Seeing the drawings and preparatory studies displayed at the exhibit is a small sample of the herculean effort. Before weaving, they would be rendered in reverse, because the loom would flip them. Raphael was paid about a thousand ducats for the designs. The weaving in Pieter van Aelst’s Brussels workshop cost around fifteen thousand more, enough that Leo’s spending left the papal treasury in debt by the time he died.That is the cost of the first tapestries, one that almost bankrupted the famously profligate Pope Leo X.A few rooms on, the exhibit hangs three of those tapestries, woven not for the Vatican but for Philip II of Spain in the late 1540s or early 1550s, a generation after Raphael’s death, from a second weaving of his designs by Jan van Tieghem and Frans Gheteels. The three — The Miraculous Draught of Fis…