Canadian novelist removed from Prix Goncourt longlist after AI allegations

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The Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, has removed a Canadian novel from this year’s longlist after reviewing allegations that author Thélyson Orélien used AI to write it and saying that his previous work included passages that appear to have been plagiarized.

C’était ça ou mourir is Orélien’s first novel, which was being considered for the prize that will be awarded in early November.

In a statement in French Friday, the Académie Goncourt said it had made the decision to protect the integrity of the prize and to send a clear message that “affirms we neither endorse nor reward in any manner the creation of texts generated with the help of AI.”

The Goncourt cited the examples of past plagiarism alleged by Montreal newspaper La Presse Wednesday, and also said it was likely that Orélien had used AI for the novel.

In a statement Thursday, his Quebec publisher Les Editions du Boréal said it is halting promotional activities for the title but could not conclude whether AI was used on the manuscript before it reached the publishing house.

It said it remained troubled by the allegations of plagiarism but also deplored “hateful messages and personal attacks” to which Orélien has been subjected and noted that the debate over the use of AI goes far beyond this one book.

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The hit of the French literary season, C’était ça ou mourir describes the arduous adventures of a Haitian school teacher who escapes violence in his home town and flees across North America, eventually making his way to Quebec. Critics have praised its poetic evocation and personalization of the migrant’s plight.

Orélien’s novel, which generated a frenzy among international publishers with sales to 23 countries, was slated to be translated into English and published by Scribner in the U.S. in 2028. Its title translates as “It was either that or die.”

Orélien and his publisher in France, Éditions Grasset, had strongly rejected the allegations after the X account “Balance ton Claude” posted early this week that the AI detector Pangram gives the novel a 100-per-cent score for the use of AI.

The French writer Samuel Fitoussi has since identified himself as the name behind the X account, which he said was a group effort to defend literature written by real people against the effects of AI.

On the same day as the post, the novel won France’s Prix du Roman Fnac, voted on by booksellers and readers.

Grasset had called the allegations “fake news,” saying it had total confidence in the writer.

Orélien, a Haitian-Canadian who lives in Ottawa and is currently on a book tour in France, has given one interview on the subject. This week, he told the Paris newspaper Libération, in French: “I did not expect attacks of this kind. I am not sad, but angry.”

“I have always loved creating and writing. I don’t see why I would need a machine,” he added.

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However, after the AI allegations concerning Orélien’s novel surfaced, La Presse launched an investigation into his earlier writings and published the results Wednesday, showing several examples of alleged plagiarism.

Also using Pangram, which can reveal similarities between texts, La Presse found that Orélien’s 2012 short story Où va le monde, which won a people’s choice award in a Radio-Canada contest, contains four passages totalling about 100 words that appear to have been taken from Le matin des magiciens, published in English as The Morning of the Magicians. It was a popular 1960 book about the paranormal by French authors Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier.

La Presse also found several other examples where blogs or opinion pieces under Orélien’s byline in Canadian media appeared to take passages from international publications. A commentary about heroes published in La Presse itself in February, 2013, reads like a translation of an English-language article that appeared in The Philippine Star in Manila five days earlier.

Meanwhile, a University of Toronto economist says it is obvious that Orélien’s novel was written by AI – and posted on social media that he’s offering $1,000 to anyone who can prove that Pangram produces false positives, identifying human work as AI generated.

“He may have come up with the story, he just didn’t write the words on the page,” said Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the Rotman School of Management at U of T who specializes in AI models.

Bryan thinks the public does not understand the accuracy of the detectors when given significant samples of writing.

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To make his point, he is offering to donate $1,000 to charity for anyone who can submit an example of French literature to Pangram and get a 100-per-cent AI score, wrongly suggesting that the work was written by a machine not Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac. He stipulates that the sample must be at least 1,000 words long and written prior to the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

Bryan said that while he can readily identify several literary tics as typical of AI, Pangram would be identifying thousands, making it statistically unlikely that it would misidentify a human text as AI.

C’était ça ou mourir, he said, features classic AI devices of 2025, the year before the book was published, such as heavy use of metaphor, sentences that begin with abstract nouns, odd or incorrect uses of articles, and lists of three characteristics or examples that move from an abstract word to a specific one used metaphorically. Bryan speaks and reads French and says the AI tics are very similar in the two languages.

The controversy over the novel is reminiscent of the debate over The Serpent in the Grove by the Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir, which won the Commonwealth Prize for a short story in Britain this summer despite allegations that it had been written by AI. Social-media posts pointed to lists of three, “not x but y” constructions and unusual word choices as evidence.

Defenders of the story suggested that AI detectors could be fooled by the non-standard uses of English that might characterize Caribbean writing. Similarly, in an initial statement released by Boréal, Orélien was quoted attributing his writing style to his Haitian and Caribbean background.