Thélyson Orélien’s debut novel was destined for top literary lists, then the AI accusations came

A French novel published earlier this year about a Haitian refugee fleeing to Canada was headed for top literary prizes in France until an anonymous X account claimed its writer committed a bigger sin than overusing similes: using AI.

Thélyson Orélien’s debut novel, C’était ça ou Mourir (which translates to It Was That or Dying), was taken off the longlist yesterday for the Prix Goncourt, one of France’s most prestigious awards, because of the allegations.

Quel scandale: The accusations came from a small anonymous account that claimed to have fed random passages of the novel into the AI detection program Pangram, which determined the selected passages were 100% AI generated based on patterns in the writing. Academics subsequently using similar programs also found high percentages of AI-generated content in Orélien’s book.

Orélien has denied the accusations, saying that his writing style uses Haitian and Caribbean repetition and rhythms. He told news outlets he is preparing a file to prove his innocence. While AI software detection programs have been criticized for casting too wide a net and being trained primarily on European text, Pangram’s founder, Max Spero, claims the program has a false-positive rate of 1 in 24,000.

Like any mystery that starts on the internet…online sleuths are digging in, and they claim to have found examples of plagiarism in a past essay and novella written by Orélien.—MM