A French novelist named Sébastien Bailly has a book coming out from Robert Laffont in February. It’s called Les Touches fantômes, and he made it partly with AI, mostly Claude, he told La Provence. He’s not hiding it. Surprise.
Here’s the part that got me. Bailly says he first showed his editor what the machine could crank out in 24 hours. Impressive, he said, and not publishable. Then came more than six months of work to turn that into a novel he could look at and say “I wrote it.” He has 32 versions of the text on his hard drive. He says he’s never worked so hard on a book. His publisher, Frédéric Martin, told Ouest-France it took around thirty versions and more editorial work than Bailly’s earlier books. And Bailly’s line on the tool: AI doesn’t help him any more than the piano helps the musician.
Now look across town. According to France Inter, Madrigall, the holding company behind Gallimard, plans to start running manuscripts through an AI detector in January. Same country, same autumn, same panic after the Orélien mess. One house is saying, let software tell us who’s guilty. The other is saying there can’t be a good text written with AI without a good author behind it. That’s Martin, and he’s wary of handing a machine the job of judging human work.
I’m with Martin. And the detectors are AI. You’re asking a machine whether a machine was involved, then wrecking somebody’s year on the answer.
What Bailly’s story shows is the thing that actually matters, and it isn’t a percentage. It’s the six months. It’s the 32 versions. It’s a guy who could have shipped the 24-hour draft and didn’t, because it wasn’t his yet. Slop isn’t slop because a tool touched it. It’s slop because nobody put anything in. A two-minute thought with a machine bolted on isn’t really yours. Six months of fighting a draft until it sounds like you? That’s writing. Love the tool or hate it, the work is the work.
That’s the little world we’re building at GAPOZ. Circle is being built for people who want to do that kind of work, with other people. Members request assignments. Reviews are structured and prompted, submitted right on the site, and they walk reviewers through different lenses so the feedback goes deeper than “I liked it,” and they push for real feelings, not polite noise. Writers can revise and resubmit. Thirty-two times, if that’s what it takes. Credit you earn can be spent on your own work or someone else’s.
On AI, Circle doesn’t try to make the law, and we’re not drawing up formulas for what’s allowed. Before your first submission, we ask you once to be honest about if and how you use AI. It’s part of the membership agreement. Honesty, that’s what we ask. It’s your word and your reputation. How you feel about AI in your own writing or production is your call. The one place AI isn’t allowed is reviewing someone else’s work. We are not interested in how AI feels about it. You can go get an AI opinion from an AI chatbot. What we want from a review is honest and informed human feedback.
Circle can help someone who writes to be the best, but those aren’t the people it was built for. It’s for writers who want to be their best. The ones who write for the love of it, because they must. AI will probably beat all of us at “best” someday. That won’t matter to them.
And I’ll be straight with you: Circle is new. There’s no crowd yet. The bones are in place, and we’re looking for founding members who want to get to work and who’ll have a real say in how this grows.
If that’s you, join us and earn your satchel.
Registration is open at gapoz.com. No fees. Membership to the Circle is limited and subject to approval. Satchels are earned, not given away. Come meet people, make some friends, and grow your craft together.
Your name. Your word. Your work.
Also on the beat
- France’s Prix Pascal, a prize for fiction co-written with AI that asks for the model and prompt, opens for submissions today. The Guardian
- The Society of Authors pulled out of the ethical AI charter it launched days earlier and parked the question for its Nov 19 AGM. The New Publishing Standard
- A federal judge let YouTube creators’ class action against Runway, over alleged scraping of their videos to train Gen-3, move forward on Oct 30. Open Class Actions
- AO3 could be down up to four weeks after a security incident, and meanwhile an unaffiliated site, ao3.life, is serving copies of 15 million fan works and selling computer-narrated audiobooks of them. TechCrunch and ao3.life’s about page
- Novelist Joe Dunthorne wrote back to his AI-written fake fan mail and followed it to a walled compound in the Philippines. The Guardian
How this was made
AI assisted research and a first draft of this Circle View. A human reviewed, edited, and is accountable for the judgment and the final take.
