Moliere Ex Machina: AI used to create new work' by beloved French playwright

"L'Astrologue ou les Faux Presages (The Astrologer, or False Omens), a three-act comedy, made its debut at the Royal Opera at the Chateau de Versailles last week. The two-hour play tells the story of a wealthy bourgeois Parisian who, under the instruction of a charlatan astrologer called Pseudoramus, insists his daughter Lucile marry a debt-ridden and elderly wigmaker. While the theme could well have been dreamed up by Moliere, the dialogue, music, costumes and scenery were all created with the help of a French AI tool called Le Chat (The Cat)."

"A group of researchers at the Sorbonne worked on the project, called Moliere Ex Machina, for two and a half years. The team included a three-person group of artists and researchers called Obvious. One critic described the AI imitation as striking, almost disconcerting' and said the dialogue was entirely believable'. The production involved what they described as intellectual ping pong of about 20,000 exchanges between researchers, classical literature scholars, linguists, historians and Le Chat."

"As the team fed more information into the AI assistant, each word and scene it came up with went through numerous rewrites as the researchers explained to the AI assistant why certain passages did not work and asked it to try again. The process was long and demanding, said the play's director, Mickael Bouffard, the head of the Theatre Moliere Sorbonne. He added that Le Chat's first draft ran to only eight pages that were not very interesting and as a result scenes had to be revised multiple times."

A three-act comedy titled L’Astrologue ou les Faux Presages premiered at the Royal Opera in the Chateau de Versailles. The plot follows a wealthy Parisian bourgeois who, guided by a charlatan astrologer named Pseudoramus, forces his daughter Lucile to marry a debt-ridden elderly wigmaker. Dialogue, music, costumes, and scenery were created with help from a French AI tool called Le Chat. Researchers at Sorbonne University worked for two and a half years on the Moliere Ex Machina project, involving artists and researchers. The team used iterative rewrites, with about 20,000 exchanges among scholars and the AI assistant, to refine scenes and improve drafts. The director said early drafts were short and uninteresting, requiring multiple revisions.

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