Haiti Novelist Accused of Using AI to Write Book Removed from French Prize List

A Canadian-Haitian novelist Thélyson Orélien who had been in the running to win a top French literary prize was struck off the list after it emerged he used AI to entirely write a book.

The organisers of France’s most prestigious literary prize confirmed on Friday the removal of a critically acclaimed novel by a Canadian-Haitian writer from the longlist after an anonymous online account claimed the book was “almost entirely” written by AI.

The Académie Goncourt said the decision to withdraw Thélyson Orélien’s novel C’était ça ou mourir (It Was That or Die) was “driven by the desire to preserve the integrity of the Goncourt prize and the academy itself, whose central role is to promote and honour literature written by women and men”.

Th Guardian reports that the Haiti-born author’s book is a lyrical first-person account of how a history and geography teacher flees a home country mired in gang violence and embarks on a perilous journey across 12 countries before finding a haven in Canada.

It was published in France by Grasset in August and has sold about 35,000 copies to date.It won the Prix du roman Fnac, with translation rights sold to more than 20 countries.

An anonymous account called Balance ton Claude – a reference to Anthropic’s AI agent – said it had fed the novel into the AI detection software Pangram and found it to be “almost entirely” written by artificial intelligence.

Questions have been raised over Pangram’s accuracy, and French media outlets have found other AI detection programmes that identified It Was That or Die as very probably written by a human.

Studies have shown that Pangram is highly accurate in detecting AI use, with a successful detection rate of over 95%, and virtually no false positive

However,the author,Orélien, 38, has denied the allegation, saying it was racially motivated.

“I’ve always loved creating and writing,” he said. “I don’t see why I would use a machine.”

He told the newspaper Libération that he used traditional language and rhythms that were Haitian and Caribbean.

“The imagery, repetition and rhythm are a living language, they are mine.”

The author of the anonymous X account was lateridentified on the pages of the centre-right newspaper Le Figaro as one of its own columnists, Samuel Fitoussi, the author of an essay against “wokeism” on film and TV.

On his own X account, Fitoussi said he had initiated his campaign because even though he was “techno-optimistic”, he feared that “AI will cause the disappearance of reading and writing”.

Use of AI has brought debate in the literary and journalism world on how its use can be regulated and remain ethical.