Molière via AI: Sorbonne researchers created a new play in the style of the French classic

Molière has risen. More than 350 years after the death of the French dramatist, scientists from the Sorbonne in Paris and the Le Chat neural network have taken up his pen together — creating an experimental play in the master's style.

How AI Helped Classical Literature

Sorbonne researchers posed an ambitious question: can artificial intelligence reproduce Molière's style — his wit, pace, comedic rhythm? They trained Le Chat on texts by the classic author and gave it one task: write a play as Molière would have written. The neural network not only generated dialogue. It also participated in creating music, costume design, and scenography — an integral performance, not just a text. The result will be shown in Versailles: a full-fledged comedy with live actors, musicians, and scenography created with AI. This is not real-time generation, but the result of complex creative work between human and machine.

What Made Up the New Comedy

The play combines classical theatrical elements with AI generation:

• Dialogue in Molière's style — sharp, rapid-fire, filled with wordplay
• Musical accompaniment created by the neural network
• Costumes and props designed by AI
• Seventeenth-century scenography built with the help of a tool
• Live actors interpreting roles written by the machine

Key feature: this is not just text, but a full-fledged performance. Each layer — from dialogue to visuals — bears the mark of both classical style and contemporary AI creativity.

Why Molière

Molière is for the French what Shakespeare is for the English. He represents the pinnacle of national culture, synonymous with wit, theatrical genius, and social satire. An attempt to "resurrect" him through AI is not simply an experimental project. It is a question: can a modern machine understand and continue the legacy of a great master?

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

— style or just probabilistic word associations?"

This question lay at the heart of the project.

What It Means

The boundary between "style reproduction" and "creativity" becomes blurred. AI can already analyze the structure of a masterpiece and generate in its manner. But people are needed — to select the best, to give it meaning, to assemble it into a unified performance. Molière Ex Machina is not a triumph of AI over classical literature. Rather, it is a new form of dialogue: a master from the seventeenth century converses with a machine from the twenty-first century, while the director-human stands at the center.