AI and literature: 'No one in this debate has asked whether a writer has the right to work with a machine'

Since Monday, September 21, one novel has been judged according to one standard. An anonymous account submitted C'était Ça ou Mourir ("It Was That or Dying"), by Thélyson Orélien, to an artificial intelligence detector, which concluded that the book was written almost entirely by a machine. The next day, Grasset, Orélien's publisher, dismissed the affair as "fake news" and a "conspiracy theory." One side accuses, the other denies. No one in this debate is asking whether a writer has the right to work with a machine.

Grasset's defense reveals more than they intended, reminding us that the author "expresses himself very well" and "has been writing all his life." The conclusion: "He doesn't need AI." That phrase is meant to reassure, yet it implies that a talented writer has no use for these tools, and that using them would betray a weakness. The anonymous account and the publisher may disagree on the facts, but they share the same belief: Writing with a machine is a transgression. As long as the literary world thinks this way, writers will only occupy two roles: a cheat or an innocent. There is no room for the writer who uses these tools and is open about it.

Such a writer does exist. I can testify to this all the more easily because I write with AI, and I have even shown other writers how I do it. I know exactly what this work entails. Some might imagine you just type, "write me a novel about exile." Try it: You will get 100 smooth, predictable pages, full of well-turned phrases that say nothing. A book requires raw material beyond the machine: ideas, testimonies, places, names, details. Heart. Then you have to construct the narrative, find its rhythm. Above all, someone has to decide what stays, what gets cut, what is rewritten; someone must say no to the machine 100 times because it never knows when to stop, and yes once when the desired balance (or imbalance) has been reached.

None of this is foreign to literature. In 1961, Raymond Queneau published Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), a book that creates sonnets by combining lines. Georges Perec wrote La Disparition (A Void, 1969) under one constraint [not to use the letter "e" even once], which some of the first readers overlooked. Oulipo ["Workshop of Potential Literature," a literary research group co-founded in 1960 by mathematician François Le Lionnais and novelist and poet Queneau] is based entirely on the idea that constraint – and even procedure – can become creative tools. No one ever stripped Queneau of his status as an author.

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