{"id":568662,"date":"2026-05-06T04:56:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T04:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/568662\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T04:56:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T04:56:12","slug":"can-ai-recreate-the-soul-and-wit-of-the-french-shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/568662\/","title":{"rendered":"Can AI recreate the soul and wit of the French Shakespeare?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Moli\u00e8re\u2019s stature in the canon of French literature is\u00a0comparable to that of Shakespeare in English. <\/p>\n

The 17th-century playwright is such a towering figure that the French often describe their mother tongue as the language of Moli\u00e8re.<\/p>\n

The use of artificial intelligence to write a new play in the style of the emblematic dramatist might have seemed almost sacrilegious, were it not the brainchild of leading Moli\u00e8re scholars at the Sorbonne. They spent nearly three years on the project, working with three French artists who have been using AI to create paintings, sculptures and videos for a decade.<\/p>\n

\"PaintingMoli\u00e8re is widely regarded one of France\u2019s greatest playwrightsAlamy<\/p>\n

Together, they trained Le Chat, a French AI assistant, to imitate Moli\u00e8re\u2019s biting social satire and his memorable turns of phrase, many of which have passed into everyday French.<\/p>\n

The resulting play,\u00a0The Astrologer, or False Omens, is being staged this week at the Royal Opera of Versailles. The three-act farce tells the story of a credulous father whose obsession with astrology leads him to force his young daughter to marry an elderly wigmaker.<\/p>\n

Pierre-Marie Chauvin, a Sorbonne vice-president, said the play is close to what Moli\u00e8re himself might have written. \u201cThe project is consistent with the Sorbonne\u2019s policy of allying arts and sciences,\u201d Chauvin said. \u201cOur university has the best Moli\u00e8re specialists and we also have the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre Moli\u00e8re Sorbonne, which recreates 17th century theatrical techniques. We approached this project in the most rigorous way possible to remain faithful to the spirit of Moli\u00e8re and his creative process.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Actors<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Many Hollywood stars are sounding the alarm over the threat that AI could one day take over filmmaking, copying their voices and generating images that look like them. Nicolas Cage has urged fellow actors to \u201cprotect yourselves from AI interfering with your honest and authentic expressions\u201d.<\/p>\n

James Cameron, the director of\u00a0Avatar\u00a0and\u00a0Titanic, said AI could \u201cinvent a character, fabricate an actor or even generate a performance from a simple text prompt \u2026 to me, that\u2019s horrifying. I don\u2019t want a machine to take over the work I take pride in doing with actors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pierre Fautrel of Obvious, the trio of artists experienced in AI who worked with the Sorbonne team, said: \u201cThe stars are justified in seeing AI as a potential threat, but what we wanted to show in this project was that a responsible use of AI could make it into a useful creative tool.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chauvel added: \u201cAI can\u2019t be intelligent on its own. It\u2019s a tool that obeys humans and humans made all the decisions, big or small, to create this play. AI alone can\u2019t create works of great artistic or literary value. It needs a lot of artistic input from humans. Left to its own devices, AI will generate something superficial.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the outset, the team simply asked Le Chat to write a play in the style of Moli\u00e8re, but \u201cit was not good\u201d, Chauvin said. \u201cWe decided on the theme and then it took years of continual revising and rewriting. It was a painstaking process.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

Fautrel said the text was generated by AI, but the creative team chose from and reframed a multitude of different options that it suggested for each line. \u201cThere were at least 20,000 back-and-forth exchanges between the creative team and the algorithms. The astrologer\u2019s name, Pseudoramus, was an AI suggestion, and it\u2019s a stroke of genius, but we chose it from a lot of options,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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Moli\u00e8re, the nom de plume of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, is known to have possessed books about astrology. \u201cHe used astrologers as secondary characters, but what he was really interested in was denouncing the credulity of humans and exposing charlatans and pseudo-scientists who try to manipulate people,\u201d Fautrel said. \u201cThese themes are highly relevant today.\u201d<\/p>\n

The project cost about \u20ac1 million, largely funded by American donors including Eric Schmidt, Google<\/a>\u2019s former chief executive, and Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. \u201cDespite current strains between the US and France<\/a>, this showed that transatlantic friendship still lives,\u201d Chauvin said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Moli\u00e8re\u2019s stature in the canon of French literature is\u00a0comparable to that of Shakespeare in English. The 17th-century playwright…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":568663,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-568662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}