In short
- Thélyson Orélien, 38, won the Prix du Roman Fnac for his first novel, C’était ça ou mourir, the first prize of the French literary season.
- The group Balance ton Claude said on Tuesday it had tested passages of the manuscript with the detection programme Pangram and reported a result of ‘100 percent AI’.
- Orélien denies the allegation and says the first draft of the novel was written in 2019, before text-generating AI programmes became widely available.
- Orélien was born in 1988 in the northern Haitian city of Gonaïves and moved to Montreal in 2010; he is a finalist for the Goncourt and Renaudot prizes.
- Publisher Grasset said the allegations ‘are atrociously injurious to a writer with an exceptional life-story’.
Thélyson Orélien, a 38-year-old Haitian-born Canadian writer, has denied that artificial intelligence wrote his first novel, C’était ça ou mourir, after a little-known group claimed on Tuesday that the book was “almost totally” machine-generated. The novel won the Prix du Roman Fnac, the first prize of the French literary season.
Who is accusing the book of being written by AI?
A group calling itself Balance ton Claude — a reference to Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude — said on X that it had tested passages from different parts of the manuscript and obtained “the identical result: 100 percent AI”. The group, whose membership is unclear, said the detection was carried out with a programme called Pangram, which it described as “by far the most accurate”, and said Pangram had been shown to make a wrong call about an AI-generated text only once in every 24,400 cases.
What does Thélyson Orélien say?
Orélien told the newspaper Libération that he had always loved creation and literature and could not see why he would feel compelled to use a machine. He said he was compiling a dossier with his editor to prove he wrote the book himself, adding that the images, repetitions and rhythms in it were his own, rooted in Haitian and Caribbean traditions. He also told Libération that the first draft was written in 2019, before text-generating AI programmes became generally available.
How has his publisher responded?
Grasset, the publishing house behind C’était ça ou mourir, defended the author, saying the allegations “are atrociously injurious to a writer with an exceptional life-story” whose “work of creation is original and powerful”. The novel follows a teacher who flees gang violence in Haiti and reaches Canada, where he rediscovers “the right to breathe without fear”. Orélien’s Canadian publisher has described the book as its biggest seller in 60 years, and it is due to be translated into around 20 languages.
Who is Thélyson Orélien?
Orélien was born in 1988 in Gonaïves, in northern Haiti, and moved to Montreal in 2010. Before leaving Haiti he wrote mainly poetry, and he later worked as a journalist in Canada. He is a finalist for the Goncourt and the Renaudot, the most prestigious annual awards in French-language literature, which are due to be issued soon.
How reliable are AI detectors?
Critics of Pangram and other detection tools say they are unreliable, often returning different results for the same text. The programmes do not know who or what wrote a text: they look for statistical patterns common in AI-generated writing, patterns that can also appear in human work. Research has found that such tools can wrongly flag human writing as AI-generated and miss machine-written text that has been edited or paraphrased. Some critics also say the programmes are built around standardised French or English and cannot accurately interpret texts using Caribbean dialect.
Has this happened before?
The dispute echoes the case of Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir, whose Commonwealth Short Story prize for The Serpent in the Grove was initially withdrawn in July over allegations that it was written with generative AI. The organisers later re-awarded the prize after saying they were satisfied the writing was genuine.
Frequently asked questions
Did Thélyson Orélien use AI to write C’était ça ou mourir?
Orélien denies it, and his publisher Grasset says the work is original. The group Balance ton Claude says the manuscript was “almost totally” written by AI, based on tests with the detection programme Pangram; no independent verification has been reported.
Who is Thélyson Orélien?
He is a 38-year-old Haitian-born writer who moved to Montreal in 2010, worked as a journalist in Canada and won the Prix du Roman Fnac for his first novel, C’était ça ou mourir. He is also a finalist for the Goncourt and Renaudot prizes.
What is Balance ton Claude?
It is a little-known group, whose membership is unclear, that named itself after Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude. On Tuesday it accused Orélien’s novel of being written by AI after testing passages with the programme Pangram.
How reliable are AI text detectors like Pangram?
Critics say the tools are unreliable: they identify statistical patterns rather than authorship, often give different results on the same text, and can wrongly flag human writing or miss edited AI text.
With reporting from BBC News.
Stock image, not from the events described. City Skyline — Joe deSousa / Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0)
