Demi Moore parle de l’IA et de l’art

What does “se battre contre des moulins à vent” mean?

Se battre contre des moulins à vent means to fight a pointless, unwinnable battle against an enemy that isn’t really there. It comes from Cervantes' Don Quixote, who mistook windmills for giants and charged them. The French adopted the image in the 1700s and it stuck — the go-to phrase for chasing a chimera or tilting at problems that can’t be defeated by force.

Here it frames the AI debate: resisting AI outright, the speaker suggests, is like Don Quixote charging the windmills — futile — so better to learn to work with it. That’s the idiom’s classic use: not “a hard fight” but “a deluded, doomed one.” English shares the exact image in “tilting at windmills,” also lifted from the same novel.