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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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A scandal has erupted in the French literary scene after Thélyson Orélien the Canadian-Haitian author of C’était ça ou mourir has been accused of writing his novel with AI.

The novel won the Fnac Novel Prize and is currently a finalist for some of the most prestigious annual French litterature awards such as the Goncourt and the Renaudot.

On Tuesday an X account called Balance ton Claude claimed the book was entirely written with AI using Pangram 4 to attest it, but any frequent user of AI assisted writing can recognize blatant tells in the text of the novel, such as common AI formulations, incoherences between different chapters and a generally repetitive style.

The author denies it, claiming the first draft of the book dates back to 2019, well before AI tools were widely available.

However, beyond the author, the scandal is splashing over the whole Parisian edition milieu, a well oiled book selling machine whose mediocrity and pompousness has long been criticized. Are the people who claim to be the defenders of Eternal France and its prized literary tradition so asleep at the wheel that they'll award prestigious prizes to low quality prompts?

The defense of the author and Grasset, the publishing house, also takes a certain culture war direction, shielding themselves behind the author's origins and "exceptional life story" against "numerous racist attacks".

A recent development of the story may put holes in this defense however, as another X user has discovered that an older award winning novella of Orélien's, Où va le monde, was entirely plagiarized from a 1960s text of Louis Pauwels.

Man, I'm almost afraid to put this out there, but I keep wondering when the left is finally going to discover some new bullshit like "cognitive equity". They aren't liars who faked all their credentials with AI. AI is actually a form of cognitive equity! It's leveling the playing field the same way retards of all walks of life can demand accommodations from the cradle to the grave, and push all the externalities of their misbegotten existence on the schmucks around them who are still dumb enough to try to be productive.

Man, I'm almost afraid to put this out there, but I keep wondering when the left is finally going to discover some new bullshit like "cognitive equity". They aren't liars who faked all their credentials with AI. AI is actually a form of cognitive equity!

Yeah, possibly they will argue that (1) AI training is based on all the world's writings (2) as everyone knows, the majority of the world's writings have been created by people of color and even literature with nominally white authorship was typically stolen from non-whites (3) therefore AI is yet another example, kind of like corn, of westerners stealing and commercializing the tireless and generous work of the Global South, and (4) therefore it's completely reasonable for people like Jason Arday to make use of AI in their work.

Or perhaps they will take the classic hypo-agency route: Westerners created unfair conditions which inevitably lead to these sorts of situations.

I think what's most likely that progressives will argue that these types are being targeted and hounded due to racism and more or less ignore it if the accusations are true.

It's an interesting exercise to guess at the strategy they will pursue, but ultimately the main thing is that one way or another, I'm pretty confident the Left will find some way to minimize, distort, deny, or deflect this type of misbehavior while blaming the situation on their favorite scapegoats.

It's leveling the playing field the same way retards of all walks of life can demand accommodations from the cradle to the grave, and push all the externalities of their misbegotten existence on the schmucks around them who are still dumb enough to try to be productive.

Which is why an elite cluster that wants to survive maximally unenslaved needs to hurry up and establish (or retain to the greatest extent possible) an aristocracy of the Abel-bodied those who are dumb enough to be productive on their own before their own AI puts enough of them out of work for said people to [have to] force this kind of settlement on them.

Perhaps such an elite will come to the conclusion that they must subsidize the conditions required for classical liberalism far beyond the point they economically make sense. That is the best way we have to create such an aristocracy, for in such a system, it is the worthless who are forced to subsidize the worthful by their disproportionately suffering real, measurable harm to their psyches created by the existence of things they don't like.

incoherences between different chapters and a generally repetitive style

This is my problem with accusations of "AI slop".

Most 100% human-made genuine artisanal work is slop. This guy is on the cusp of winning prestigious awards with obvious slop, but, wait, he had some AI assistance. Maybe a little. Maybe a lot. Now it is the bad kind incoherent repetitive slop that we can't let sully prestigious French literary awards. Not the good incoherent repetitive slop deserving of the highest accolades.

This is my problem with accusations of "AI slop".

Agreed the worst is uppity engineers who get off on calling everything AI slop. They were the same ones who dismissed LLM agents as ever having the ability to develop software as good as them when it was new, now that the writing is on the wall they have a new way to protect their ego: call everything AI slop.

Can you rewrite your PR description? It's AI slop. Get the fuck out of here, the description is actually fine, just because you can tell it was written by an LLM doesn't make you any better of an engineer.

Haven't ever seen an AI pr description hit the points that are actually important, like what the pr is actually supposed to do.

They always just rehash the object level changes without context, which are obvious from the code anyways.

The point of the text box is to convey additional information that's not obvious from the diff.

This is just so outdated, the PR descriptions absolutely provide context and link Jira tickets. Vastly superior to previously human-written PRs. Granted that's only been true in the past say six months. But yes, believe it or not the agent that wrote the code is also at better at writing the PR description than you are.

This is why it just screams "uppity engineer" to me. Really? You're going to tell me that the LLM can't write a PR description with necessary context but you can? No. If you gave it the relevant context during planning it will be described in the PR description, and described way better than previous human-written PR descriptions.

Maybe you can make it do that but I haven't seen a single case of what you say in the wild.

Why don't you show an example if such a thing exists? I can show you dozens of examples of shit made with the latest models, let's see you show a single example of a good pr.

This is really the phenomenon I'm describing. I cannot believe there are people who believe what you just said- that using the latest models, an LLM can't create a good PR including a good PR description. You are just in denial in order to protect your ego, like before it was "LLMs will never be able to code as well as me" but now that's gone so these uppity engineers are pretending LLMs can't write PR descriptions when they absolutely can do so very well with barely any handholding.

It is not the case that LLMs are capable of writing ~99% of code but are unable to write PR descriptions of the code they wrote, it is the case that egotistical engineers still want to assert a sense of superiority by calling things "AI slop" which are actually well-written and useful and vastly superior to what they would have handwritten by hand.

Show me an example then. I'm waiting. I've seen dozens of prs from the latest claude opus and they all suck.

If AI is as good as you say it is, surely there must be one pr in an open source or source a available corporate project that demonstrates this.

This is an example of an AI-generated PR with an AI-generated PR description I would instantly recognize as LLM-generated. It's totally fine. Yes, it's obvious that it was not written by the engineer and that's honestly what sets off the uppity engineers who complain about "AI Slop" that majority of the time. They can just tell it was written by AI so they complain and nitpick.

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Possibly relevant: Hundreds of LLM-generated pull requests in the repository for Duolicious

I am not much of a programmer, so I don't know whether these are good or bad.

Dunno. If you can't be arsed to write a description, leave it blank. It's not like we were diligent about it before AI (at least not anywhere I've worked). Don't make me do extra work checking if the generated description makes sense. I've got to review the code anyway.

If you had an AI generate it, I want to be able to tell that you, the human being, personally did at least a first pass over it, not just chuck it over the fence unseen for me to either reject or greenlight. And that does mean go through it and remove the most obvious AI-isms by hand. Not because I care about the AI-isms per se, but because I want to see that you have at least read your own submission.

If I'm to sign off on it then I want to make sure it's OK. I'm taking part of the responsibility for it after all.

It's so easy to have AI generate reams and reams and reams of text, or code, and it is not fair, I think, to have the reviewer be the first real person to read through it to see if it all makes sense. Humans aren't perfect either but at least there's a limit to their output.

One should expect more rigor and good taste from the highest literary prizes than from a teenager's first draft essay, surely.

Yeah good art is messy, to say that disqualifies the whole category because bad art is messy too is sophistry. An honest man can tell the difference.

The French literary establishment can't because they're socialite idiots who stopped caring about their supposed object of worship a long time ago.

If the first draft dates back to 2019, it's an open and shut case, right? We just need to see the draft.

It would depend how close the published version is to that first draft. It's possible that they wrote the first draft themselves, but then re-worked it using AI. Especially since (I'm just going by his wiki biography here, I had never heard of him before) he grew up speaking Creole, not standard French. And apparently he plagiarized a lot of other things he wrote from existing books.

Is it time for all writers to start using git to be able to prove they really wrote something?

Git history can be faked. I think it should be a timelapse, like the artists do.

Timelapses can be faked, too.

It’s harder than git, which is trivial with AI. But it’s also fakeable, yeah

This is a solved problem. Just put the commit hashes on a blockchain as you make them.

Of course, there's (by design) no way to do it after the fact; you need to have anticipated you might be challenged on the timeline and set this up in advance. Doubt many people are actually doing this in tech, let alone writing. Certainly no one was worried about proving their novel wasn't written by AI in 2019, though this process does have other uses, like establishing authorship (or at least that you had access to the intermediate versions at the time).

The traditional solution from the ye olden days of the 20th century was that when you sent a manuscript to a publisher for review, you would also mail a copy to yourself.

But what does that prove today in the context of AI?

It doesn't "prove" anything anything.

What it does is provide corroborating evidence for claims of prior knowledge/ownership of the material in question.

That doesn't make it unfakeable. Just have the AI break down the story into a plausible sequence of edits and schedule for publishing the commit hashes to the blockchain. By design you still have the latency of writing but don't have to actually write anything.

Oh, apologies, I think I misunderstood your point. This method establishes a time lapse is real in that it demonstrates the various intermediate versions existed at the stated times. (They could all be made ahead of time, but each piece must have existed prior to its timestamp.) It doesn't prove those intermediate versions weren't made with AI. (It would have if the author in question could prove they had a substantially identical draft in 2019, but that's not terribly useful going forward.) In terms of 'proving' the work isn't AI, it really only makes it less convenient, not impossible. The same is true in principle of art time lapses (which are generally accepted as evidence), but it's probably easier to fake for written work, given your git commits are going to be a lot less granular. I suppose you could include your vim undofile (or equivalent) in the repo, which would be harder to fake convincingly.

Doing that in 2019 would be quite the feat.

Indeed.

Almost like faking a moon landing in 1969.

You can upload them to any website then archive it. archive.org or archive.today tampering with their archive is unlikely (yes I’m aware of the stupid drama between archive.today and this blogger, but that doesn’t translate into him ever tampering your blog for your benefit). Both tampering is even unlikelier.

The downside is your draft must have a public URL. Except it can be someone nobody would stumble on, then the archive sites get too much requests, it’s basically still private.

You could publish an encryption of the text and just not reveal the key until you need to.

Sure, I guess? It just seems inferior to the blockchain method, which requires zero trust and has no risk of exposing your work. I'm also not sure how easy it would be to prove ownership over an archived website at the time of archival -- well, you could just put a digital signature on the page, I guess. I suppose the edge is that it's easier to explain how this proves the timeline to nontechnical people? And maybe cost, though I'm not sure about that given opentimestamp's batching strategy; both are free to the user, anyway.

I think the blockchain is technically better, but archiving is more accessible for normies.

OTOH I don’t know how to upload a commit hash to a reliable blockchain. I found https://commitproof.com/, but is it trustworthy? Why Cardano? And it costs ~$0.75 per upload. I suppose I can ask Claude.

Or I think I could upload to IPFS, but this blog post (first search result) makes it seem relatively complicated. Whereas to archive I just paste the URL into an archive site.

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Hoo boy. The question is, is the novel worthy of the award regardless of whether or not it's AI written standing on its own merits? If so then I suggest it gets the award and for next year the committee can update it's rules to forbid AI submissions.

If being a "true" story about the author's hardships growing up in Haiti and smashing racism, rather than any quality of the writing, then yes I guess so...

You're going to have blood on your hands if he kills himself in response to these racist, colonialist attacks.

Speak plainly.

It's pretty clearly a reference to Jason Ardnay, the black Cambridge professor who killed himself after being revealed to be a serial fabulist and plagiarist.

No doubt. I just have an aversion to certain types of ironic posting, which make various assumptions about the audience in a way that is reminiscent (to me) of reddit.

If only shame was all it took to spill the blood required.

A recent development of the story may put holes in this defense however, as another X user has discovered that an older award winning novella of Orélien's, Où va le monde, was entirely plagiarized from a 1960s text of Louis Pauwels.

I was bewildered by this. How is it that it could be entirely plagiarized from a work from the 1960s, even if that work is by a writer on the more obscure side? He's notable enough to have an English Wikipedia entry, surely someone should have noticed something in the 14 years since Orelien's novella was published? Well, it's really just the tip of the iceberg:

Several of Orélien's other works were subsequently [after AI allegations] investigated. According to Radio-Canada's Décrypteurs team, about half of his short story "Où va le monde", which was awarded Radio-Canada's Prix du public in 2012, was plagiarized from The Morning of the Magicians, a book written by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, and published in 1960. The opening lines are identical to that of the 1960 book, but the last two words were removed.[20] According to Le Point, Orélien's opening lines also clumsily copied the original's "débonder une source" as "déborder une source", and elsewhere in the story he copied many sentences verbatim.[21] Radio-Canada also found at least five journalistic pieces by Orélien that were published by Canadian and French media in 2012 and 2013 and which it determined had been partly copied from texts by other writers. Orélien's 2012 opinion piece "Ne mettons pas nos héros sur un piédestal", published in La Presse, was found to have plagiarized a piece published five days earlier in The Philippine Star. This was acknowledged by La Presse, which has now tagged the article saying, "Since the publication of this text, we have learned that its author committed plagiarism." Orélien's 2013 piece "Barack Obama aurait pu être Trayvon Martin il y a trois décennies", published on the blog of France's RFI, included a word-for-word translation from Portuguese to French of at least four paragraphs of "Matin, Obama" by Gilberto Rodrigues, which was published by Pressenza [it] days earlier. His 2013 piece "Le prochain pape devrait être plus jeune", also for RFI, features verbatim almost half of an editorial published in India's The Hindu two days earlier. Additionally, in 2013, his piece "Sommes-nous aussi libres que nous le pensons?", also for RFI, borrowed phrases and paragraphs from "The Problem of Free Will" by Pablo Saborío, published in 2008 on Saborío's personal blog Beyond Language.[20]

I don't even know what to say. Has there ever been a prominent English language author who got away with this much naked plagiarism for this long? Do you guys not have turnitin dot com or something?

How advanced were non-English plagiarism checkers in 2012? Ripping off a Portuguese article by translating it into French seems like the kind of thing someone could get away with back then, but would get caught pretty trivially today by LLM analysis. No one looked too hard at random op-eds, but once the author got scrutiny by winning a major award he was doomed.

And what about the short story that's half copied verbatim out of a book?

It could be that for these sjw awards and stuff nobody actually reads the work, they may just performatively buy it and put it on a shelf. Same way most Nazis never read mein kampf. So I could totally buy that nobody noticed.

It could be, but then you'd expect to see that in other languages too. And I don't really think you do. Perhaps Arday is the closest example, but he didn't win an award for his writing per se, and AFAIK he only plagiarized certain passages rather than entire works.

The author denies it, claiming the first draft of the book dates back to 2019, well before AI tools were widely available.

This doesn't strike me as much of a defense even if it's true. If he could put the first draft and published draft side by side and show how much of the former he'd retained in the latter, that would be one thing. But presumably the published draft is all but unrecognisable compared to the first draft.

That incident shows how small and insulated the Francophone literary world is. Midwit English-language fanfiction readers can recognize LLMisms practically instantly, but fancy French literary critics do not use LLMs in French and do not read anything else beyond the latest crop of literary fiction, allowing themselves to get bamboozled by an AI-cowritten novel in late 2026.

Or they didn’t find it particularly important, because this novel was already going to be the award winner and they didn’t give a damn about anything else?

Ah, a story I can root against everyone involved! Shitty artists! DEI bullshit! The French! Lit snobs with terrible taste!

At this point, any aspiring writer who isn't faking six disabilities, four genders and three ethnic groups is just plain lazy.

This is why I only submit to mil-sf outlets anymore. If you can't bench press your body weight, march ten miles in full kit, and fuck a hole through the carburetor of a 1963 Chevy Impala, you're not even going to get out of the slush pile.

You can publish mil-sf without doing any of those things. I know women who have published mil-sf.

But you are right that Baen books or Black Library doesn't care how many disabilities you can fake.

Does autism qualify as a disability?

Yes, but I suspect most mil-sf writers are not faking it.

I know women who have published mil-sf.

I'd keep them away from your carburetor.

Now that's a car part I've not seen for a long time.

Time to return to the honored tradition of using a fake pen name and persona to write your novels, I suppose.

Who wants to read female-protagonist urban fantasy by a guy named "Daniel"? An initialized name like "MLN Hanover" is much better.

I'm not sure it counts as a persona, given that he can be found out in literally one second of research.

Time to return to the honored tradition of using a fake pen name and persona to write your novels, I suppose.

I think if you wanted to capitalize on affirmative action, then most likely at some point you would need to step forward and prove that you really are a wheelchair bound black Muslim lesbian or whatever.

As I recall, there was a case a few years back in Australia where a white male writer pretended to be an Aboriginal woman and won some prestigious prize. But I think it would be hard to get away with that for long.

Gattaca but for lily white nerdy authors and their wheelchair bound lesbian black body donors.

Yeah kind of, but, some white women get away with it. Sacheen Littlefeather, Elizabeth Warren and others. A white guy could never pull this off. Quite a few white women have. One in the US Senate right now.

Jamake Highwater comes to mind: he wrote several award-winning books and worked on PBS documentaries on the fake basis that he was Cherokee. IMO worse, after this was published in the 80s, he continued to have a career doing so, notably consulting on Star Trek: Voyager.

Ward Churchill would have got away with it if he hadn't made crass comments about 9-11. And I assume there are more male fake Indians who didn't do anything cancellable who did get away with it.

Tsk tsk, this is Grey Owl erasure!

Honestly, there seems to have been a mini-craze in the late 19th/early 20th century for accounts by Red Indians (as would have been the terminology of the time) of how things used to be, and it seems a lot of those were written by non-natives. These ranged from what I suppose you could call historical fiction, stories of real American Indians but written by white men, to fake biographies of white men claiming to be Indian (as with Grey Owl).

This unironically.

Yesterday Radio-Canada put out an analysis comparing Orélien's work to others with Pangram, and it looks pretty damning. Obviously those who cannot speak French can translate it via AI, but the gist is that they tested the various excuses used by Orélien's defenders: seeing how it stacks up versus the other books nominated for the Prix Goncourt, how it compares to works by other contemporary Haitian or African francophone authors, and how it compares to various classics. The conclusion is that Orélien's is the only one that shows use of AI, and to a very convincing degree: apparently the false positive rate for Pangram is much lower in French than in English.

Using AI to translate a tool which uses AI to measure the AI usage in a book.

How perverse.

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