Orélien admits earlier plagiarism but denies AI wrote his debut novel

Thélyson Orélien has acknowledged plagiarising material in work published before his debut novel, while maintaining that no sentence of C’était ça ou mourir, published in English as It Was Either That or Die, was generated by artificial intelligence. In a statement released by his Quebec publisher, Éditions du Boréal, the Haitian-Canadian writer apologised for having claimed texts that were not his own. The New York Times reported that the admission concerned accusations over opinion articles and a short story published more than a decade ago. “Admiration does not give you the right to take, to claim as your own texts that are not yours,” he said. Orélien nevertheless rejected the central allegation against his novel as “slander and heresy”. He said he had occasionally used AI tools for research, particularly to check foreign idioms, but insisted: “But no sentence in this book was created by a machine.” He said the book’s text, structure and plot were his own. He said he began writing the migration novel in Laval in late 2017 and completed a first draft of more than 300 pages in 2019. He then spent years revising it, including removing scenes, changing characters and reworking passages. The novel follows Jonas Dorléon, a Haitian migrant, and explores migration, exile and identity in a story Orélien said drew on his own experiences and those of other migrants. The chronology is central to his defence. Orélien said the first draft predated the emergence of text-generating services such as ChatGPT, and argued that mistakes made in his youth could not constitute evidence against a novel begun in 2017 and published in 2026. That account has not settled the dispute. Le Monde reported that Orélien had not released the early drafts, while Boréal said it could not categorically confirm or deny whether AI had been used. AFP’s test of an excerpt with Pangram returned a 100% probability of AI use, but other detectors gave sharply different results, ranging from very likely human-written to 100% AI-generated. As we reported in September, the Académie Goncourt removed C’était ça ou mourir from its selection on Sept. 25 amid the AI allegations and the confirmed plagiarism concerns in Orélien’s earlier work. The academy said convergent analyses by researchers and journalists suggested the novel was very likely largely produced by AI, and that withdrawing it was necessary to protect the integrity of the prize. The accusations first surfaced on Sept. 21, the day the book won the Prix du roman Fnac, when the anonymous X account Balance ton Claude circulated Pangram screenshots purporting to show it was wholly AI-generated. Samuel Fitoussi later identified himself as one of five people behind the account. Boréal suspended promotional activity after the Goncourt decision, but the novel remained in contention for the Prix Renaudot, Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and Prix Médicis. Translation plans covered more than 20 countries, underlining the commercial stakes of a controversy that has also focused attention on the reliability of AI-detection tools and the acceptable limits of AI assistance in fiction.