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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12170 thread views

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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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