A Montréal professor publishes a book about AI, written with AI

Montréal, October 2026

Stéphane Vial, Full Professor at the School of Design of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), publishes A Living Lexicon of Artificial Intelligence: ninety-one concepts, one page each, to better understand AI and how it works.

Not only was the book written with AI, it also documents the process. The last four pages tell how the author went about writing with AI without ever giving up his intellectual standards: “I did not say it could do so better than me. I said faster,” he writes.

The foreword and critical reading are by Marcello Vitali-Rosati, Full Professor at the Université de Montréal. Peer review is the foundation of scholarly publishing, and writing with AI changes strictly nothing about that.

The book is self-published, as a creative and exploratory choice. Such a writing experiment, rather ahead of its time, required complete freedom. What is more, with the help of AI, the author went further still and ran the whole chain himself, from the cover to the legal deposit, and accepted the price: no bookshops, no distribution, no editorial team.

The book is aimed in particular at teachers and students in every discipline, who now have to talk about AI before having had the time to study it. It ends with these words: “Artificial intelligence can assist with writing. It never exempts us from thinking.”

The English edition is translated from the French; the translation was revised by Alexia Moyer. The original, Petit lexique vivant de l’intelligence artificielle, was published on October 6, 2026.

Review copies are available on request, in print or as a PDF.