0. THE WEAVERS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

In 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard — a Lyon silk weaver’s son, born into the trade of the canuts — built on the work of his predecessors to present the prototype of a programmable loom, which he would refine and patent in 1804 under the name “Jacquard loom.” Until then, weaving complex patterns required a tireur de lacs (drawboy): often a child or a woman who manually lifted a series of threads with each pass of the shuttle while the weaver worked. The Jacquard loom replaced this human labour with a punched card that introduced a binary logic:

• A hole = a rod passes through → the hook rises → the thread goes up (1);
• No hole = the rod is blocked → the hook stays still → the thread stays down (0).

In the decades following Jacquard’s invention, the master manufacturers did away with the drawboys and slashed the price of silk fabrics, destroying the weavers’ economic model and setting the stage for the canut uprisings of 1831 and 1834.

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We — authors, writers, artisans of the Text — from the Latin textus, texere: textile, to weave — find ourselves today, in 2026, in the position the canuts occupied at the turn of the nineteenth century. A new machine has been born: artificial intelligence (AI) built on large language model (LLM) technology. It is our twenty-first-century Jacquard loom — an analogy that recalls what Ada Lovelace prophetically wrote in 1843 about Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine,” the theoretical ancestor of the computer: “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”¹

More generalizable than the Jacquard loom, AI “weaves algebraical patterns” that already apply to every domain of human activity. In our particular discipline — writing — it braids sentences, assembles paragraphs, unfolds scenes and chapters, ventures into narrative and poetry. For now, it still falls short in creative writing. It composes far better than the vast majority of human beings, and it can handle copywriting tasks very well, but it has not yet reached that level of nuance — that very subtly calibrated register — of which poets and prose writers are capable.

We are living through the earliest hours of a technology evolving at a frenetic pace. The literary output of Claude Opus 4.5 in 2026² is light-years from the dreck ChatGPT was producing in 2023 or 2024. We can oppose the Jacquard loom, but it is hard to deny that it exists and that it improves month after month, year after year.

The implications for artists of the text are enormous: on the horizon, we can make out a world where the author — if the word still means anything — will no longer write the entirety of their texts by hand. A world where human creative activity retreats into the mind and the imagination, while the act of weaving prose or verse is increasingly delegated to the machine.

Such a prospect will inevitably provoke outrage. It is up to each of us to decide where we stand in relation to the world that is coming. Personally, I do not see intelligent writing as a choice but as an inevitability. Despite the revolts, the power loom won. Hand weaving still exists, but it now belongs to folklore. When I travel through northern Thailand or the Peruvian Andes, I like to visit weaving villages and buy a thick cotton Karen tunic or a finely woven alpaca aguayo. If writers dig in against the machine and continue to write everything by hand, publishing at the pace of traditional publishing, they will become like the weavers of Mae Hong Son province or the Lares Valley: artisanal text weavers, makers of folkloric beauty.

We forget that writing has not always existed, and that historically it was often delegated to a scribe, a copyist, or a public scrivener. We can no longer imagine a world in which the technique of writing is not performed by the person who has something to say. We can no longer imagine a world in which the weaving of text no longer passes — or no longer entirely passes — through a command of cursive handwriting or typing. There is nothing natural about the arbitrary convention of the QWERTY or AZERTY keyboard, and history can sweep away in a single gust what seemed destined to last forever.

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The essay Intelligent Writing offers a deep dive into the transition toward a new regime of the art of writing. What form will writing take in the age of intelligence? I explore historical, technological, aesthetic, and economic dimensions of this transition; I present practical experiments in AI-assisted writing; I propose technical pathways for transforming one’s workshop into an intelligent writing laboratory; I explore the shift from the quest — the search for one’s voice — to the request — a new cycle of prompted writing; I address the question of reading as a regeneration of texts; and finally, I open onto the post-transition prospect of a world in which textual scarcity would no longer exist.

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1. Ada Lovelace, “Note A,” appendix to the translation of L. F. Menabrea’s article Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs (Vol. III), 1843, p. 696. ↩

2. At the time the first draft of this essay was written, this was Anthropic’s flagship model. On February 6, 2026, the company released Claude Opus 4.6. ↩