Goncourt removes Orélien novel from longlist as AI detector results conflict

The Académie Goncourt removed Thélyson Orélien’s *C’était ça ou mourir* from its longlist for the Prix Goncourt after allegations that it was generated largely by artificial intelligence. The academy said convergent analyses by researchers and journalists indicated the book was “in all likelihood” largely AI-produced, and linked its decision to plagiarism accusations involving Orélien’s earlier work. As this publication reported on Sept. 25, the academy said the withdrawal was intended to protect the integrity of the Goncourt and to make clear that it did not endorse AI-generated texts. The book had been on the prize’s initial longlist, rather than its forthcoming shortlist. The allegations began Sept. 21, the day the novel won the Prix du roman Fnac. An anonymous X account, Balance ton Claude, said it had fed the text into the detector Pangram and found it was written “almost entirely” by AI. Samuel Fitoussi later identified himself as the account’s author, saying writers who present copied AI output as their own betray a moral pact with readers. Orélien has denied using AI. He said the book’s “images, repetitions [and] rhythms” reflected his own Haitian and Caribbean traditions, and described the campaign as an attempt to silence his voice. He also said he had faced racist attacks and was compiling a dossier with publishers in France and Quebec. Grasset, the French publisher, said Orélien began the novel in 2017 and completed a draft in 2019, before generative AI became commercially available. Its editors said they retained absolute trust in and admiration for his work. Boréal, the Canadian publisher, suspended promotion of the novel to support the author’s well-being, while saying that without credible, concrete evidence it was not for the publisher to decide whether the book had a right to exist. The case has also highlighted differing results from AI detectors. Le Monde reported that other detection tools returned different results, while The Guardian said some classified the novel as probably human-written. Benoît Raphaël also found that Pangram identified samples of Orélien’s pre-2023 poetry, short prose and criticism as human-created, and correctly classified chapters of other Haitian novels submitted for comparison. Pangram has been presented as a leading detector, with cited studies claiming AI-detection rates above 95 percent and very few false positives. But false positives do occur. The tool was previously used in claims against a Commonwealth Writers Prize-winning story by Jamir Nazir, who was later officially cleared. Independent research has also documented weaknesses in detector-based judgments. A Stanford study found that seven detectors labelled 61.22 percent of TOEFL essays by non-native English students as AI-generated; 89 of 91 essays were flagged by at least one system. James Zou of Stanford said the tools often rely on “perplexity,” a measure correlated with writing sophistication, and are unreliable and readily gamed. The Goncourt decision also followed reports about Orélien’s earlier journalism and fiction. Radio-Canada found at least five of his columns and opinion pieces partly copied material from other authors, while La Presse reported that a 2013 column was almost entirely a lightly edited translation of an article published days earlier in *The Philippine Star*. La Presse also reported that his 2012 award-winning short story *Où va le monde* contained at least four sentences identical to Louis Pauwels’s 1960 book *Le matin des magiciens*. The novel, released by Grasset in August, follows a history and geography teacher escaping gang violence in Haiti and crossing 12 countries en route to Canada. It had topped French bestseller lists, sold about 35,000 copies and secured translation rights in more than 20 countries. Orélien, 38, emigrated to Canada in 2010 after an earthquake devastated Haiti and destroyed his home. The Goncourt shortlist is due Oct. 6, and the prize winner is scheduled to be announced in November.