Did AI write France’s breakout novel? What we know about the Thélyson Orélien controversy

“We tested several passages, at various points in the manuscript, and got almost always the same result: 100% AI,” the collective wrote on X. The post went viral, accumulating more than 4.9 million views and over 1,800 reposts at the time of publication.

Orélien has denied the accusation, and his French publisher, Grasset, has expressed “absolute confidence” in him. His Canadian publisher, Éditions du Boréal, has taken a more cautious line.

The Académie Goncourt administers France’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, awarded annually to the author of “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year.” On Friday, it removed Orélien’s novel from its longlist “to preserve the integrity of the Goncourt prize and the academy itself.”

Who is Thélyson Orélien?

Orélien was born in 1988 in Gonaïves, Haiti. He studied law in Haiti and left for Canada after the 2010 earthquake. Before leaving, he primarily wrote poetry. In Canada, he continued his studies in economics and political science at the Université de Montréal and worked as a journalist and columnist. He settled in Montreal and moved to Ottawa in 2022.

Critics describe his writings as “inhabited by memory, exile, and the question of belonging.”

What is the novel about?

Thélyson Orélien’s debut novel C’était ça ou mourir, which translates as It Was Either That or Die. (Reuters)

Set in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, C’était ça ou mourir follows Jonas Dorléon, a teacher whose neighbourhood is stormed by heavily armed teenagers. With his house on fire, he realises he faces an impossible choice: leave or die.

He escapes and crosses 12 countries, including the Dominican Republic, Brazil, the Darién jungle between Colombia and Panama, Central America and Mexico, before crossing the US border and settling in Canada. The French edition runs to 272 pages, and translation rights have been sold in around 20 countries.

It is the biggest seller in the history of Éditions du Boréal since the Canadian publisher was founded in 1963. Grasset published it in France on August 19. By mid-September, it had sold nearly 32,000 copies in France and had won four major prizes:

📌Prix du Roman Fnac
📌Prix Méduse
📌Prix Première Plume
📌Prix Roman News Publicisdrugstore

It was longlisted for the Goncourt, the Médicis, the Femina, the Renaudot and the Prix Décembre. The Goncourt has withdrawn Orélien’s novel from the longlist.

Orélien’s response

Orélien says he began writing the novel in autumn 2017 and completed a first draft in 2019, years before generative AI tools became widely available. “I have always loved creation and writing. I can’t see why I would feel compelled to use a machine,” he told the French newspaper Libération.

He argues that the stylistic features critics flagged are rooted in Haitian and Caribbean literary traditions: repetition, rhythm, and cascading imagery. He cites Aimé Césaire and Jacques Stephen Alexis as influences. He said he was “putting together a dossier” with his publishers in France and Quebec “to prove” that he wrote the book himself.

“I did not expect attacks of this kind. I am not sad, but angry,” he said, adding that he had faced racist attacks since his recent arrival in France. By Thursday, speaking to AFP from a literary festival in Manosque, he described a “will” to “silence” him.

The plagiarism allegations

After the controversy broke, La Presse, the Montreal daily, reported that a 2013 column Orélien wrote for the paper was almost entirely a lightly reworked translation of an article the Philippine Star published days earlier. Franceinfo identified another text of his containing a paragraph taken word for word from a 2014 opinion piece by former Colombian minister Rodrigo Botero Montoya. Other alleged examples have since circulated online. The plagiarism allegations concern texts from more than a decade ago, not the novel.

A day later, Boréal suspended all promotional activity for the book, citing Orélien’s well-being. The book, however, remains on sale. The Salon du livre de l’Estrie in Quebec cancelled his appearance and withdrew his guest-of-honour title the same day.

A pattern of accusations

Orélien is the latest in a string of authors to face AI allegations this year. The Nigerian author Jerry Falade lost a reported $2 million deal with Minotaur Books after his agents withdrew the manuscript, saying they could no longer verify how he wrote it. Falade denied using AI to write the book, said he had used it only for research, and called the allegations “racially motivated.”

Mia Ballard, a Black American horror author, had Hachette pull her novel Shy Girl after a New York Times investigation. She denied using AI and said an editor she hired for the self-published version used AI tools.

H M Wolfe, also a Black American author, faced accusations after a study reported by The Atlantic found that Pangram scored her bestselling novel Daggermouth as 60% AI-generated. She denied it, and her publisher, Simon & Schuster, and her fans stood by her.

Falade has argued that all three Black authors who landed major deals this year had them cancelled or disrupted over AI suspicions. Many of Orélien’s defenders see the same pattern in his case.

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize drew international headlines when Pangram flagged “The Serpent in the Grove” by the Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir as AI-written. Nazir had been named the Caribbean regional winner in May. After reviewing the regional winners’ drafts, timestamped documents, notes, and outlines, the Commonwealth Foundation cleared him and named him overall winner on July 1. The uproar was such that Granta, the British literary magazine, ended its partnership of more than a decade publishing the prize’s winning stories.

What the Goncourt says

Immediately after the allegations were levelled, Philippe Claudel, president of the Académie Goncourt, said he had “at no moment” suspected the novel was written with AI.

“Let’s not throw opprobrium immediately on an author whose book is currently riding high,” he told Franceinfo. “I always give the benefit of the doubt to those who are thrown to public opinion like this.”

Claudel also questioned the timing of the accusation, asking why it was surfacing now. “You have an author who is Haitian and Canadian, who is Black, who is francophone, who is foreign, who writes about migrants,” he said.

He had earlier cautioned that the book’s place on the second list is not guaranteed, since a vote will decide it. But if “irrefutable proof” emerges by October 6, “obviously we would take a decision,” he said. In the wake of plagiarism allegations, the Goncourt removed the novel from the longlist on September 25.

Are AI detectors reliable

Pangram, the tool at the centre of the controversy, claims a false positive rate of about one in 24,400 documents, based on its own English-language benchmarks. According to two recent studies, one from the University of Chicago and one from Belgium, it is the most reliable detector on the market, ahead of GPTZero, OriginalityAI and RoBERTa.

AI detectors look for statistical patterns, such as low “perplexity” or “burstiness,” that correlate with machine-generated text. Some experts say these patterns can also appear in texts that use non-standard forms of English or French.

The results so far point in different directions:

📌 AFP ran the account’s excerpts through its own verification tool, InVID-WeVerify, which judged them “very probably written by a human.”

📌 Seven other detectors AFP tested gave wildly divergent results. One gave 100% AI, two concluded the opposite, and four varied from excerpt to excerpt.

📌 Other newsrooms that repeated the Pangram test largely reproduced the account’s findings. La Presse submitted the entire novel and got a score of 94%. CBC replicated the 100% result using different excerpts.

📌Franceinfo’s own excerpts scored 100% AI, and one passage run through GPTZero scored 87%.

📌 Radio-Canada ran the other Goncourt-listed novels available digitally in Quebec through Pangram, and all came back 100% human.

📌Franceinfo tested Orélien’s earlier work, published in 2014 and 2015, and Pangram classified it as 100% human. That result has given many pause, though it cuts both ways: it suggests the tool is not simply misreading his style.