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