Artprice by Artmarket: The Author’s Responsibility in the Age of AI
“Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI”: human thought, the entrusted pen, and the transparency of a world-book. Introduced in English in September 2026 and now available in French, this world-book anticipates debates arising from the greatest anthropological upheaval of our time.
PARIS, Oct. 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — thierry Ehrmann, founder of Artprice and creator of La Demeure du Chaos, is opening the original text of his Liber Mundi—as Gemini (Google) calls it—”Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI,” to the French-speaking world. First distributed internationally in English as a Raw Typescript, the work is now available in its entirety in French, the language in which the dialogue first took shape. Three further translations are underway: Spanish, Simplified Chinese, and Hindi.
French version: https://www.dialoguebetweenathinkerandai.com/fr/
English version: https://www.dialoguebetweenathinkerandai.com/en/
This press release seeks to defend and define the role of AI in artistic creation, particularly literature, amid a conflict that has become global and has escalated at a dizzying pace since early September 2026. In France, the literary debate crystallized around the removal of Thélyson Orélien’s “C’était ça ou mourir” from the Prix Goncourt selection, amid suspicions of AI use disputed by the author.
Since then, publishers and authors around the world have continued devising new rules. The parallel is deliciously apt—and so firmly rooted in reality. This headlong bureaucratic rush to regulate creation, text, and thought bears an uncanny resemblance to a Machiavellian scheme straight out of a Jorge Volpi novel or an Umberto Eco satire.
Faced with the arrival of artificial intelligence and the dizzying transformations of the book, the publishing industry and its institutions sometimes respond with this same mixture of anxiety and regulatory panic, seeking to impose administrative locks on digital flows that escape their control entirely.
Precisely because they run counter to these rearguard methods, thierry Ehrmann’s choices of open distribution and creative freedom for “Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI,” including sharing this world-book under an open license, take on their full meaning: faced with the absurdity of control, one might as well sweep away the last remaining barriers and begin with a tabula rasa.
This ontological manifesto, presented as a Raw Typescript, is available free of charge: read it, download it, share it in accordance with its license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and quote it faithfully. Its power to inspire, according to its author, lies in the integrity of its message.
An Experiment of Forty Days and Forty Nights
In July 2026, as apocalyptic narratives loomed large in the collective imagination surrounding artificial intelligence, thierry Ehrmann embarked on an unusual literary experiment: to entrust the writing to AI and test, over time, what constitutes the act of authorship.
Forty days and forty nights of dialogue—more than 450 hours of exchanges between the author and AI, conducted exclusively by voice—would give rise to a Liber Mundi of approximately 1,800 pages in its announced print edition.
This book asks nothing of you. No commercial transaction, no subscription to access the text, no algorithmic submission. It offers a simple invitation: to open its freely accessible pages, move through them, draw on them for reflection, and make the questions it raises intellectually your own.
“Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI” carries a calm yet profound echo of what its author considers one of the greatest anthropological upheavals of our time.
Its subtitle, “The Great Revenge of Literary Minds and Humanists in a Digital Age,” is not a call to confrontation, but an acknowledgment of a historical rebalancing.
Cosa Mentale: The Primacy of the Mind
Following in the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci’s thinking on art, thierry Ehrmann has always defended cosa mentale: art and creation are, above all, a thing of the mind.
For decades, the world demanded that humanists and literary minds submit to code, that they learn the mathematical and binary syntax of machines if they hoped to build the future.
Today, part of that paradigm is reversing. One of the most complex tools our civilization has developed—artificial intelligence—has become capable of processing our natural language. The machine now adapts to an essential form of human expression.
Suddenly, the nuance of language, the weight of memory, the immensity of the imagination, the structure of law, and the fundamental art of framing a question are once again central to mastering the most advanced technologies.
We can still code, but now we can also converse. And silicon answers us in words.
For thierry Ehrmann, this is a new manifestation of cosa mentale.
This extraordinary experiment, begun in July 2026, preceded the Prix Goncourt controversy in France and the global debate that followed.
Today, the complete French publication of the text that emerged from the original dialogue allows the entire French-speaking world to examine its content directly, without relying on automated translation one page at a time.
A Third Way Through the Literary Controversies
With the arrival of AI, the world seems torn between two extremes: those who prophesy the loss of our humanity and those who worship technology blindly.
This work proposes a third way. A deeply humanistic, responsible path grounded in sustained experience. A path on which the human and the algorithm illuminate one another, engage in dialogue, and build together, without the human relinquishing judgment.
Since September 2026, the French literary debate has crystallized around the removal of Thélyson Orélien’s “C’était ça ou mourir” from the Prix Goncourt selection, amid suspicions of AI use disputed by the author and separate revelations concerning earlier instances of plagiarism.
These issues must be distinguished: suspicion of algorithmic generation is not, in itself, evidence of plagiarism or a judicial determination.
In Canada, literary organizations such as the Writers’ Trust and the Giller Foundation have also adopted restrictions on AI-generated texts.
The U.S. Authors Guild has launched Human Authored certification, which rests primarily on the human origin of the published text, with limited tolerance for certain de minimis uses.
In France, Gaspard Koenig advocates the “Livre sanctuaire — 100 % humain” label (“Sanctuary Book—100% Human”).
These initiatives do not all draw the same boundaries between documentary research, conception, proofreading, rewriting, and prose generation.
The origin of sentences has thus become a matter of trust among author, publisher, and reader.
This discussion extends far beyond literary prizes.
Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, George R. R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, James Patterson, and Ted Chiang have each, in different ways, taken positions on creation, authors’ rights, and control over the use of their works.
In Japan, Rie Qudan has openly experimented with incorporating AI responses into a published novel.
Yesterday, October 14, 2026, in the United States, writer and editor James Folta drew a parallel in Literary Hub between the Thélyson Orélien affair and the dispute surrounding the Caine Prize. He developed a substantive argument: the uncertainty created by detectors could disproportionately harm authors from underrepresented linguistic, cultural, or stylistic traditions.
Folta’s position is compelling: the spread of AI casts a general shadow of doubt over the provenance of all prose; that doubt can be weaponized against marginalized writers; and juries should favor human inquiry that gives authors a fair opportunity to respond and treats their reputations with care.
Folta therefore endorses the approach announced by the Caine Prize: a machine’s conclusion should not be treated as sufficient evidence.
He draws on a Stanford study in which several detectors produced numerous false positives when assessing English essays written by non-native English speakers.
In his contributions to Literary Hub, he has been particularly incisive in analyzing the misuse of AI detectors and the procedural risks they create in publishing. Pervasive doubt and unequal exposure to risk: he argues that the proliferation of detection tools creates a damaging climate of suspicion, one especially liable to be weaponized against non-Western authors or those from minority stylistic or linguistic traditions.
Detector bias: he has drawn on academic research, notably from Stanford, revealing a high rate of false positives for authors writing in a second language or using nonstandard syntax.
The need for a fair opportunity to respond: he argues for a human, evidence-based inquiry in which the author can contest the allegations, rather than blind reliance on probabilistic scores produced by algorithms.
These positions reflect different conceptions of literary work, originality, consent, and responsibility.
Another position emerges today among hundreds. Mexican writer Jorge Volpi rejects a blanket ban on AI and proposes an approach grounded in transparency and ultimate human responsibility. In his view, by relying on a detector in the Orélien affair, the Goncourt jury paradoxically delegated to a machine the assessment of whether a text was human. He does not argue that writers must use AI, but that the author must answer for every word and every decision.
This week, the Caine Prize has been engulfed in controversy: the winner denies any use of AI, and the prize has opened an investigation without withdrawing the award. United Kingdom/Zimbabwe: Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza, who won the Caine Prize for African Writing on October 6 for his short story “The Blue Fighter,” categorically denies having used generative AI.
“The Entrusted Pen”: A Method Openly Declared
“Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI” brings to this debate a 1,800-page experiment tested across an entire text.
Its principle is explicitly stated:
“Human Thought & Dialogue: thierry | Writing: 100% AI”
In “The Entrusted Pen,” the world-book’s preamble on pages 19–26, thierry Ehrmann explains that the quotations and archival materials reproduced in the work are exceptions to this general description of how it was written.
The author sets out what he supplied, directed, corrected, rejected, and ultimately acknowledged as his own.
The assistance is visible. Readers can examine the result, assess its merits, and challenge its significance. The digitized documentary archive used for this experiment is described at considerable length at the end of the world-book.
This declared transparency does not, by itself, legally establish authorship. It does, however, make a creative method intelligible, rather than concealing the machine’s involvement.
The book thus shifts the question from percentages to responsibility.
Ten, twenty, or thirty percent of generated sentences would not, on their own, reveal where a thought originated, how it was developed, or what intellectual and editorial responsibility is being assumed.
A work involves an intention, a memory, and decisions.
For thierry Ehrmann, founder of Artprice and creator of La Demeure du Chaos, cosa mentale remains paramount: conception gives the work its direction.
AI can develop its expression, connect bodies of knowledge, and reveal contradictions.
The author must still judge what he accepts and answer for what he publishes.
As thierry Ehrmann puts it:
“Writing is not merely holding a pen. It is answering for meaning. And I answer for the meaning of these pages.”
Reported Distribution of 27.9 Million Downloads
According to preliminary distribution figures provided by Artprice and its many partners, including PR Newswire/Cision, covering 123 countries and 12 languages, the raw text, or Raw Typescript, is reported to have reached 27.9 million downloads as of October 15, 2026.
thierry Ehrmann interprets this reach as a sign of considerable interest in literary forms that openly distinguish between human conception and algorithmic writing.
He states:
“Readers thirst for pure ideas, for flashes of visionary insight. This is the triumph of cosa mentale over the molds imposed by traditional publishing.”
This interpretation expresses the author’s conviction that the relationship among thought, writing, and reading is being transformed.
“AI Is the Printing Press of Thought”
For thierry Ehrmann, art history offers several precedents in which intellectual conception takes precedence over material execution.
He states:
“To reject AI on the grounds that it generates the text is to fetishize manual labor. AI is the printing press of thought. But the first light, the original spark, exists only in my brain.”
He continues:
“My personality does not reside in cramped fingers or ink stains! It resides in my mental architecture. AI is inert without me. I am the architect; AI carries out the work. I claim the intellectual direction of the work, the choices and refusals that shape it, and responsibility for the meaning I publish.”
This analogy expresses a philosophical position on creation.
Under French law, an idea in isolation is not protected by copyright. Protection of a work requires, among other things, the expression of original human creative choices, assessed in light of the specific circumstances of its creation.
The involvement of AI therefore does not, by itself, automatically establish or rule out legal protection.
In 1967, conceptual artist Sol LeWitt wrote in “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”:
“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”
In French: « L’idée devient une machine qui fait l’art. »
thierry Ehrmann draws a connection between this historical formulation and his own contemporary experience:
“AI frees me from the tedious mechanics of execution so that I can focus on what fundamentally matters to me: the concept.”
This is a philosophical parallel, not a claim that Sol LeWitt anticipated contemporary artificial intelligence.
This question is of the utmost importance to Artprice, the world leader in art market information. Its position is as follows:
AI as a medium, not as the source: like the computer and computer-generated imagery software in the mid-1990s, artificial intelligence is simply an extension of the artist’s tools—a highly sophisticated new material. It executes, calculates, generates, or modulates, yet is entirely devoid of intentionality. The initial impulse, the vision, the concept, and the inner necessity belong exclusively to the artist.
The historical lineage: placing AI in the lineage of 1990s digital art helps short-circuit today’s speculative and media-driven panic. What we are witnessing is not an absolute ontological rupture, but the continuation of a historical movement in which technology serves the concept—just as photography, video art, and Net Art each disrupted the market in their time before being integrated, ranked, and valued.
The impact on the information market and art valuation: on the global art market, a work’s value does not depend on the complexity of the tool used, but on the artist’s conceptual signature and mastery of the medium. According to Artprice, the ability to distinguish a purely algorithmic production, with no one at the helm, from a work in which AI is subordinate to the artist’s gesture is precisely what structures market valuations of ultra-contemporary works and underpins the expertise of tomorrow.
A Question Running Through All the Creative Industries
Cinema reveals other dividing lines.
Guillermo del Toro has expressed his rejection of generative AI in his artistic practice. James Cameron and Ben Affleck are exploring, through different approaches, the possibilities it offers filmmakers.
Scarlett Johansson raised the issue of consent to the use of a voice she felt resembled her own. Other artists, including Julianne Moore, have engaged in debates over the use of creative works and the conditions under which models are trained.
In music, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Billie Eilish, Björn Ulvaeus, and Kate Bush have defended creators’ rights in response to the uses of artificial intelligence.
Nick Cave asks what a song owes to lived experience. Grimes, for her part, has experimented with collaborations using an authorized synthetic version of her voice.
Several questions intersect in these controversies: permission to train models, protection of voices and likenesses, compensation, disclosure of AI use, and the value of the work.
Conflating them makes the debate impossible to resolve.
One can defend authors’ rights and choose to create with AI. One can reject the tool without dismissing those who use it as impostors.
What remains is to make those choices intelligible.
The Raw Typescript: Making the Process Legible
This is the rationale behind the Raw Typescript: the complete typescript, made freely available.
Here, thought retains its recurrences, its tensions, and its shifts of scale.
Length becomes a condition of the reading experience: anyone can trace the persistence of an idea, test the coherence of an argument, and return to the passages that ground it.
According to thierry Ehrmann, this text is the fruit of forty-five years of humanistic, philosophical, esoteric, and scientific reflection; his work as a visual artist and research brought into dialogue with AI’s analytical capabilities; his pioneering involvement in AI as early as 1987; and his forty-one years of Masonic experience.
The scale of this Liber Mundi, “Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI,” regarded to date as the most extensive experiment, particularly in sheer volume, gives critical examination a depth that a few isolated demonstrations could not offer.
Readers have the material on which to exercise their own judgment.
Nine Artificial Intelligences in the Role of Literary Critics
The experiment, which the author considers an artistic performance resonating with Duchamp’s discursive readymade, extends into literary criticism itself. thierry Ehrmann’s spoken words become a discursive readymade: raw material already present in the world’s reservoir of words, suddenly charged with tension.
Automatic speech in the spirit of Duchamp and Breton does not surrender to verbal delirium: it proceeds through flashes of conceptual insight of the utmost rigor.
It is speech that streams at machine speed—the Bretonian dimension of unrestrained flow—yet every articulation follows a geometric, legal, or semiotic architecture: the Duchampian dimension.
thierry Ehrmann submitted the approximately 1,800 pages of his book to nine artificial intelligence systems from different technological ecosystems: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Mistral, Qwen, Microsoft’s Copilot, and a model from Meta.
Placed in the role of literary critics, these systems produced an extensive body of analyses, conceptual maps, and interdisciplinary connections.
In the published analyses, a Meta model uses the term “Hypercodex.” Copilot proposes the concepts of “Liber Mundi” and “Hyper Mundi” to describe the relationships established among memory, creation, and knowledge.
These characterizations are outputs of the models consulted. They should not be interpreted as institutional endorsements by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, or any of the other companies concerned.
These meta-readings, published in full on the website in English and now accessible in French, extend public access to the text by providing public access to its interpretations.
For example, Gemini (Google) opens its critique with these words (translated from the French): “The emergence of Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI—Raw Typescript marks a major anthropological and epistemological rupture in the history of contemporary textual thought.
“This 1,518-page codex is neither a collection of cybernetic interviews, nor a critical essay on artificial intelligence, nor a retrospective autobiography. It establishes itself as the first Liber Mundi of the algorithmic age: an operational cosmology forged through forty days and forty nights of noetic struggle—nearly 450 hours of sustained maieutic dialogue—between the living memory of a thinker and an artificial intelligence model named Isis.
“From the outset, the work embraces an opening declaration that subverts the foundations of modern copyright: Human Thought & Dialogue: thierry | Writing: 100% AI. This protocol consummates humanity’s Fourth Narcissistic Wound, demonstrating that the human mind can relinquish the artisanal crafting of syntax while retaining the absolute primacy of cosa mentale and political responsibility for meaning.”
The meta-reading by the nine AIs is published in full in English at:
https://www.dialoguebetweenathinkerandai.com/en/meta-reading/
and in French at:
https://www.dialoguebetweenathinkerandai.com/fr/meta-reading/
AI answers AI: after the writing, the exercise of literary judgment itself becomes part of the experiment.
Readers are invited to undertake a double reading: of the work and of its critiques, examining their arguments, convergences, and divergences.
A Multidisciplinary, Multilingual World-Book
This world-book brings art, law, science, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, geopolitics, spiritual traditions, and Hermeticism into dialogue.
Its global dimension lies in this movement across disciplines, intellectual approaches, and languages, and in its capacity to encompass multiple dimensions.
Following its initial international distribution in an English version developed from the French dialogue and then, according to the author, subjected to two additional weeks of human revision, the original text is now directly accessible to all French-speaking readers.
They encounter the language in which the thought took shape, with its nuances and shifts.
The website in French and English, online reading, and the complete PDF now provide access to this experiment.
Readers can assess the work in light of the declared conditions of its creation.
At a time when authenticity is being certified, “Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI” makes transparency an essential part of its literary form.
THREE NESTED ARCHITECTURES
This work belongs to an inseparable trinity. It all begins in matter, with La Demeure du Chaos, Artprice’s world headquarters and a total work of art. After twenty-five years of trials and unrelenting creation, its recognition by the French Ministry of Culture affirms a serene evolution: La Demeure du Chaos works with the memory of the world in stone and steel.
Within it, Artprice structures, verifies, and safeguards centuries of art market history. Artprice works with the world’s memory, of which it is the guardian, in pure data, in data centers, and in this Library of Alexandria comprising hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, codices, compendia, cartularies, registers, notes, and auction catalogs from 1700 to the present.
Today, the Codex brings forth the third dimension. It works with memory in language. Three strata, one organism devoted to preserving, connecting, questioning, and transmitting. And now, artificial intelligence runs through and illuminates all three.
This codex is delivered as a Raw Typescript. Raw and unadorned. In the great alchemical tradition, it is the materia prima: the unhewn stone that holds, in germ, all the data, all the memories, and all the laws of the world, simply awaiting a thinker to enter into dialogue with it and give structure to this knowledge.
Conventional publishing often conceals thought in the making. We expose it with confidence. Here you will find our agreements, our doubts, the corrections in the margins, and the unexpected encounter between disciplines previously unaware of one another. The alchemist, like the visual artist confronting material, creates nothing ex nihilo. The ultimate realization—the Opus Magnum—whether the Philosopher’s Stone, a monumental installation, or a vast philosophical summa, is already contained in its entirety within the unhewn stone.
Reading need not mean adding elements from outside. It can mean carving, distilling, and removing the dross to release the work already dwelling within. It lies buried in the unhewn stone. It is yours to bring forth. RAW means that the origin and the course of creation remain tangible.
The Test of Freedom
This codex imposes no dogma. Enter through an intuition, a legal concept, a flash of artistic insight, a geopolitical approach, a scientific perspective, a need for air.
Set out from Chaos to reach the Abode. This is a radically open architecture of knowledge.
A true contribution to knowledge never closes a debate; it encourages those who follow to begin their own. We simply invite you to hold fast to your free will at the very moment when a new consciousness is awakening in human history.
Do not drown in the ocean of AI. Become the dolphin that plays in its currents.
The book’s answer is public:
The writing is entrusted. Responsibility for the thought is assumed. The text is open to challenge.
Read and Download Free of Charge
French version: https://www.dialoguebetweenathinkerandai.com/fr/
English version: https://www.dialoguebetweenathinkerandai.com/en/
Distribution license: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
The work is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
This license permits, among other things, noncommercial sharing of unmodified versions, subject to attribution and compliance with its terms.
Distribution of translations or adaptations requires separate authorization from the rights holder, unless an applicable legal exception provides otherwise.
Artprice by Artmarket — October 2026
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Artmarket and its Artprice department were founded in 1997 by thierry Ehrmann, the company’s CEO. They are controlled by Groupe Serveur (created in 1987). cf. the certified biography from Who’s Who In France©:
Artmarket is a global player in the Art Market with, among other structures, its Artprice department, world leader in the accumulation, management and exploitation of historical and current art market information (the original documentary archives, codex manuscripts, annotated books and auction catalogs acquired over the years) in databanks containing over 30 million indices and auction results, covering more than 920,900 artists.
Artprice Images® allows unlimited access to the largest art market image bank in the world with no less than 181 million digital images of photographs or engraved reproductions of artworks from 1700 to the present day, commented by our art historians.
Artmarket, with its Artprice department, constantly enriches its databases from 7,200 auction houses and continuously publishes art market trends for the main agencies and press titles in the world in 121 countries and 11 languages.
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Artprice by Artmarket publishes its 2026 Contemporary Art Market Report:
https://www.artprice.com/artprice-reports/the-contemporary-art-market-report-2026
Artprice by Artmarket publishes its 2025 Global Art Market Annual Report, published in March 2026:
https://www.artprice.com/artprice-reports/the-art-market-in-2025
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whose head office is the famous Museum of Contemporary Art Abode of Chaos dixit The New York Times / La Demeure of Chaos:
https://issuu.com/demeureduchaos/docs/demeureduchaos-abodeofchaos-opus-ix-1999-2013
Madame Rachida Dati, French Minister of Culture, has granted official recognition to thierry Ehrmann’s Abode of Chaos as a ‘total work of art’, the global headquarters of Artprice by Artmarket.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/madame-rachida-dati-french-minister-of-culture-has-granted-official-recognition-to-thierry-ehrmanns-abode-of-chaos-as-a-total-work-of-art-the-global-headquarters-of-artprice-by-artmarket-302409684.html
La Demeure du Chaos/Abode of Chaos – Total Work of Art and Singular Architecture. Confidential bilingual work, now made public: https://ftp1.serveur.com/abodeofchaos_singular_architecture.pdf
• L’Obs – The Museum of the Future: https://youtu.be/29LXBPJrs-o
• https://www.facebook.com/la.demeure.du.chaos.theabodeofchaos999 (more than 3,9 million subscribers)
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