Molière by AI: Sorbonne Researchers Create a New Play by the French Classic

Molière has risen. More than 350 years after the French playwright's death, researchers at the Sorbonne in Paris and the Le Chat neural network have taken up his pen, and together they have created an experimental play in the master's style.

How AI helped a classic

Sorbonne researchers set out with an ambitious question: can artificial intelligence reproduce Molière's style, with its sharpness, pace and comic rhythm? They trained Le Chat on the classic author's texts and gave it a single task: write a play the way Molière would have written it.

The neural network did not just generate dialogue. It also helped create the music, costume design and set design, a complete production rather than merely a text.

The result will be shown at Versailles: a full-fledged comedy with live actors, musicians and a set created with the help of AI. This is not on-the-fly generation but the product of complex creative work between human and machine.

What the new comedy consists of

The play combines classic theatrical elements with AI generation:

• Dialogue in Molière's style: sharp, fast-paced and packed with wordplay
• Music created by the neural network
• Costumes and props designed by AI
• A 17th-century set design built with the help of the tool
• Live actors interpreting roles written by a machine

The key point is that this is not just a text but a complete production. Every layer, from the dialogue to the visuals, bears the imprint of both the classic style and modern AI creativity.

Why Molière

For the French, Molière is what Shakespeare is for the English. He is a pinnacle of national culture and a byword for wit, theatrical genius and social satire. Trying to "resurrect" him through AI is more than an experimental project. It poses a question: can a modern machine understand and carry on the legacy of a great master?

"When you train a neural network on a text, what does it really learn:

the style, or just probabilistic links between words?"

That question lay at the heart of the project.

What this means

The line between "reproducing a style" and "creativity" is becoming blurred. AI can already analyze the structure of a masterpiece and generate text in its manner. But people are needed to select the best material, give it meaning and assemble it into a single production.

Molière Ex Machina is not a triumph of AI over the classics. It is rather a new form of dialogue: a master of the 17th century talking to a machine of the 21st, with the human director at the center.