Robert Laffont to Publish Sébastien Bailly's AI-Assisted Novel in February 2027

Robert Laffont plans to bring out Les Touches fantômes, Sébastien Bailly's third novel, in February 2027, ActuaLitté reported on October 31. Bailly made the book partly with generative AI, and he and his publisher are saying so openly.

How the book was made

Bailly described the process in an interview with La Provence published October 11. He said the idea was an experiment he and his editor both wanted to try. He first showed the editor what could be produced in 24 hours, which he said was not publishable. Turning the generated text into a publishable novel then took more than six months of work, he said. He told the paper he mainly used Claude, in part because it could handle long texts, and that he has 32 versions of the text on his hard drive.

ActuaLitté adds two details. Readers will learn about the AI use from an introductory text at the start of the book, and a postface will describe how it was written. Back on September 24, the same report says, Bailly had argued in a Le Monde op-ed that writers should be free to work with a machine as long as they say so and stand behind the text they sign.

The publisher's position

Robert Laffont's director general, Frédéric Martin, discussed the project in an interview with Ouest-France published online on October 26. ActuaLitté's account of that interview says Martin described around thirty successive versions and more editorial work than on Bailly's earlier books. It also quotes his view in French: “Il ne peut pas y avoir un bon texte écrit avec de l'IA, s'il n'y a pas un bon auteur derrière.” In English: there cannot be a good text written with AI without a good author behind it.

Martin also defended Thélyson Orélien, whose debut novel C'était ça ou mourir (Grasset) has been at the center of France's AI controversy this autumn. Orélien's Quebec publisher, Boréal, ended its relationship with him on October 21, and the Renaudot jury dropped the book from its final list on October 28. On October 13, Orélien admitted plagiarism in earlier texts while maintaining that no sentence of the novel was created by a machine, ActuaLitté noted.

A different approach from Madrigall

Martin's stance contrasts with that of Madrigall, the holding company of the Gallimard family group. On October 22, France Inter reported, citing a source close to the matter, that Madrigall will run its manuscripts through an AI detector starting in January 2027. ActuaLitté said the software chosen and how results would be used have not been disclosed. According to ActuaLitté, Martin is wary of any process that gives a machine a role in judging human work, and sees the relationship between an editor and a writer as one built on trust.

Why it matters

French houses are splitting on AI. One large group plans to screen manuscripts with detection software. Another is putting out a novel that admits its AI use on its opening pages, before anyone has to go looking for it.