Boréal keeps Orélien’s novel in bookstores despite AI allegations

Boréal said it would keep Thélyson Orélien’s C’était ça ou mourir in bookstores, declining to withdraw the novel despite allegations that it was written with artificial intelligence and the author’s admission of plagiarism in work published before the book. The Canadian publisher said the absence of definitive conclusions meant readers should decide for themselves what place the book deserved on their shelves. Boréal said a publisher should stand by authors rather than demand proof from them. The decision followed an earlier pause in promotional activity, while the book remained on sale. Boréal had said it was working with Orélien to assemble material documenting work completed before the publisher became involved, and that it could neither confirm nor disprove the AI allegations. Orélien has denied that any sentence, meaning or structure in the French-language novel about migration was created by a machine. He said he used tools for research, particularly foreign idioms, and described the allegation as “slander and heresy.” As this publication reported this week, Orélien acknowledged unacceptable mistakes in earlier writing and offered an unreserved apology. He asked readers to judge the novel separately from that plagiarism. Large portions of his text were found in Où va le monde, a short story that won him Radio-Canada’s public prize in 2014; media reports also raised questions about a newspaper column published before the novel. Orélien said he began writing C’était ça ou mourir in Laval in the autumn of 2017 and finished a first draft of more than 300 pages in 2019, when he learned of his mother’s death. The novel was published this year and is expected to be translated in more than 20 countries. The AI accusations began publicly on Sept. 21, when the anonymous X account Balance ton Claude cited Pangram, software that claims to detect machine-generated text. Pangram tests later indicated a 100% probability that the book contained computer-generated text, and the novel was removed from the Goncourt competition. But AI-detector results are not definitive proof of AI use. Pangram itself acknowledges weaker reliability for short excerpts, while an independent study at Vrije Universiteit Brussels found the tool underestimated AI content in four of 80 hybrid or humanized research papers and overestimated it in two. Thierry Poibeau, a specialist cited by franceinfo, described detection as a “cat-and-mouse game” requiring continual retraining as AI systems change. The controversy has not stopped commercial interest. The Grasset edition sold about 73,700 copies in France in seven weeks and rose one place in the sales ranking. The novel remained in contention for the Renaudot and Médicis prizes; Médicis is due to announce its second selection on Thursday.