Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, Mythologies of AI. Ulysses and the Perils of the Digital, Éditions du Seuil, October 16, 2026, 240 pages, 18€.
On the occasion of this literary season, a novel sparked a scandal that spread far beyond the Parisian literary circle. That Was It or Die, by Thélyson Orélien — lauded by critics — sold nearly 75,000 copies in seven weeks, yet the Goncourt Prize, then the Renaudot, removed it from their lists under the suspicion that an artificial intelligence had written it! The novelist insists that he used it only for his historical research, while his Quebec publisher says they found traces of AI in his drafts. If a machine did indeed write this novel, Thélyson Orélien, now an outcast in the world of letters and far beyond, seems to have arrived too early, exposed to a public opinion not yet ready for a certain truth: that artificial intelligence can sometimes be much better than any writer. What this new power does to our minds and to our societies, Jean-Gabriel Ganascia had the genius to entrust to one of the greatest myths of humanity, the Odyssey by Homer. Published on October 16, Mythologies of AI. Ulysses and the Perils of the Digital is, in my view, the season’s event essay, the one that finally helps us understand the causes and stakes of the Thélyson Orélien affair.
The Detour to Ithaca
A professor at Sorbonne University, where he conducts research in artificial intelligence, Jean-Gabriel Ganascia also chaired the CNRS Ethics Committee. His book begins by dismantling the current fables, those machines that would make their creators sing or plot in a secret tongue. Read with the tools of Roland Barthes, they belong to the modern myth, whose hidden message serves those who sell technology while claiming to fear it. The clever move is then to take the reverse path and illuminate the present by the Odyssey.
With digital technology and AI, the world changes so rapidly that everyone feels alien and adrift, like Ulysses, tossed from island to island on the road back to Ithaca, during the perilous voyage in which his companions will perish from their own follies. “Habit dulls,” the author warns. By living online, we forget the dangers, which the detour through myth makes newly visible. Blind by tradition, Homer sees far more clearly in the screens than the servile users we are. Each stop of Odysseus corresponds to a shoal in the torments of the digital world, which the book maps and lists all the dangers. In the manner of 17th-century moralists, the author draws a lesson from each episode for our time. It took a scholar of artificial intelligence who is also a reader of Homer to dare this rapprochement, which — I dare say — is nothing short of genius!
The Sweet Captivity
Calypso holds Odysseus for seven years, promising him immortality. Jean-Gabriel Ganascia makes a very apt parallel between this “sweet” captivity and that of social-network users, willing prisoners to screens that grant their desires instantly, and the author recalls Georges Bernanos’s prophetic words who already saw in modern civilization “a universal conspiracy against all inner life.” When Hermes comes to announce his release, the hero has already left the cave. This longing for freedom provides the book its first lesson. One must tear away from the news feeds that only reinforce our own opinions. Among the Lotus-Eaters, the lotus fruit provides pleasure and forgetfulness without any effort, to the point that the sailors who taste it renounce returning home. This malignant fruit has today taken the form of videos and messages that TikTok or Instagram tailor for each individual and that we “scroll” endlessly.
Polyphemus, the cyclops who sees life as flat, imprisons Odysseus and his men in his cave, sealing it with an immovable rock. The giants of the digital world similarly hold their users captive within their social networks, and when we are not devoured, the exit from the cave comes at the cost of the complete erasure of our public life. Ganascia sees in them those whom Giuliano Da Empoli calls predators, leaders and entrepreneurs who believe in force alone and measure the world by profitability. This isolation prefigures, according to the author, the atomized society produced by profiling, where everyone receives only the information that suits them. After the sacking of the city of the Kikones, Odysseus boasts of sharing the loot fairly, including the women, with no remorse. The leaders of the digital world speak with the same rhetoric of virtue, Google with its motto Don’t be evil, Elon Musk with the freedom of expression under which he abolishes fact-checking. Let us remember that at their birth, social networks promised connection and free speech, so that everyone applauded them. A few years were enough to turn them into a dump of hatred and fake news, before which we are all powerless. It is now impossible to escape Polyphemus’s cave.
The Song of the Sirens
Circe, the human-voiced goddess of the Odyssey, expert in potions and poisons, announces to Jean-Gabriel Ganascia the conversational agents, themselves endowed with a human voice. She changes Odysseus’s companions into swine, just as AI-generated fake images turn anyone into a despicable character in the eyes of all. Circe then casts a second, subtler spell. Once her sailors have become men again, she fills them for a year with baths and feasts, to the point that they forget to go home. Under their regained human form, it is now their minds that transform into swine. According to Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, video games and social networks act in the same way. The dependency they create literally dulls us, since it deprives humans of memory and of the desire to return.
The Siren’s song promised wealth and knowledge. That of the large language models, which write, summarize, translate and program on demand, relieves high-school and university students from writer’s block for a modest price or for free. In reality, the bill is paid in personal data that we surrender in order to be fed with advertisements, but more gravely, the danger reaches the core of our intelligence, because thought is formed through writing. A MIT study, which the author details, measured this among fifty-four students. Those who wrote with ChatGPT, whose EEGs showed reduced brain connectivity, failed to cite a line from their own text. We stand on the threshold of a society where we might write without thinking. To hear the song without yielding to it, Odysseus has himself tied to the mast on Circe’s advice. The study vindicates Homer, since students who had initially written alone later made better use of the machine.
Staying Speechless
This captivating volume closes with a call to keep our eyes open in the face of innovations and apocalyptic prophecies, rather than remaining speechless. The author cites Jacques Derrida, for whom the Greek chaos also designates the open mouth, the one that silence turns mute and the one that calls.
Jean-Gabriel Ganascia will allow me, I hope, to summon in turn a myth that his book leaves out, that of Perceval, told by Chrétien de Troyes at the end of the 12th century, which speaks of the misfortune of the mute mouth. Welcomed by the Fisher King, whose wound prevents him from riding, the young Perceval sees a bleeding spear pass by, then a Grail whose light makes the candles pale. He would like to ask why the spear bleeds and who is served with the Grail. He remains silent, because his master Gornemant de Goort taught him that a knight must refrain from speaking too much. Perceval applies this code of chivalry to an unprecedented situation, as those closed morals that Jean-Gabriel Ganascia shows, following Bergson, reveal impotence in the face of the new. In the morning, the castle is empty. His cousin informs him that his question would have healed the king and brought life back to his land, then a hideous maiden announces devastated lands, widowed women, orphans and dead knights. All these evils, she tells him, will come from his silence.
The question that Perceval kept to himself, Jean-Gabriel Ganascia asks in his own way when he asks who these machines serve and the narratives that are built about them. In 2024, a professor from Lausanne, Michael Wade, designed a clock that counts the years before the reign of machines. The literary season asked software whether a machine had written a novel. These questions of date and author leave the Grail question in the margins. From this silence will come the chaos, which the book already describes, with democracies undermined by fake news and states deprived of their sovereignty. The fault will lie with humans, whom Zeus, at the first canto of the Odyssey, already accused of imputing to the gods the misfortunes born of their own errors. For those who know the value and intelligence of myths, this book is extraordinary. Thanks to Homer, it gives Perceval back his voice.
The article Mythologies of AI, Ganascia rereads Homer against fables, first appeared on Mare Nostrum.
