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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.
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.
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.
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.
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