Strange this notion of the mathematics of narration… It evolves rather naturally in the Anglo-Saxon world, but it finds strong opposition in Latin countries. What is a story?
How is it built? Answering these questions, in France, can only be done through a mystical and creative vision of narration. No question of letting the calculations of an artificial intelligence algorithm slip in.
Great is the fear of the great technological replacement.
Balèze is therefore the company of David Defendi who has taken it into his head to massively convert the crowds. Operational for a few weeks, after having been tested by 5,000 users, mainly Anglo-Saxons, its Genario platform plans to “revolutionize the world of fictional writing by putting the‘artificial intelligence at the service of authors.
He, aged 45, joined the young engineer Louis Manhès. Both have prepared their coup from Dijon with 115,000 euros collected from a handful of business angels and are preparing to raise an additional 1 million.
Genario is both a writing tool and a recommendation system, based on a subscription. Very concretely, the budding Goncourt between his literary creation on the platform, which makes the complete analysis, evaluates its emotional trajectory, the level of language, the universe of the story…
He then compares the text to a library of masterpieces ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle to Balzac and Maurice G. Dantec. And offers the user to read some of these texts to better immerse themselves in their style.
Huge potential market
Aside from the beard, David Defendi has little to do with the average Parisian, hipster, business school-educated start-upper. He lived in Silicon Valley for three years, just before the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2001, but it was to do odd jobs there: car washer, restaurant waiter… which allowed him to ensure the daily life of his bohemian life. And if he is now founding a tech start-up in Dijon, it is above all out of curiosity. When he was in the Valley, David Defendi imagined the plot of a novel, which he would write later, around a Frenchman who wanted to change his body thanks to artificial intelligence.
Son of a secret agent, he is the author of the best-selling The weapon on the left (ed. Flammarion), a story about the manipulation of the far left by the secret services. He is also the screenwriter of the detective series Braquo.
“In passing from the novel to the series, we pass from individual writing to collective writing”, explains the writer. He sees HBO launching its series like works of art and Netflix screenwriters sifting through the IMDB site to better capture audience tastes. Genario was born from these successive phases of immersion which shaped the life of David Defendi.
