Haitian-Canadian author Thélyson Orélien has denied allegations that artificial intelligence was used to write his debut novel, C’était ça ou mourir (It Was Either That or Die), shortly after the book won a major French literary prize.
Orélien, 38, received the Prix du Roman Fnac for the novel, but the achievement has been overshadowed by claims that portions of the book were generated using AI.
The allegations were raised by an X account, Balance ton Claude, which said it had analysed several passages from the novel with Pangram, an AI-detection tool.
The account claimed that passages from different sections of the manuscript produced the same result, indicating that they were “100 per cent AI”.
It also described Pangram as one of the most accurate AI-detection tools and said the possibility of an error was negligible.
Orélien, however, strongly rejected the allegation, describing it as an attack on his literary work.
Speaking to French newspaper Libération, according to the BBC, the author said he had no reason to rely on a machine to create his novel.
He said he was preparing a dossier with his French and Canadian publishers to provide evidence that he wrote the book himself.
Orélien also pointed to his Haitian and Caribbean background as an important influence on his writing style.
“My traditions are Haitian and Caribbean. The images, the repetitions and the rhythms are the living word, they are my own,” he said.
His French publisher, Grasset, also defended the author, describing the allegations as “atrociously injurious” to a writer with an exceptional life story and insisting that the novel was original and powerful.
The controversy comes as Orélien’s literary profile continues to rise in France. His debut novel has also been shortlisted for the prestigious Goncourt and Renaudot prizes and has attracted international attention.
The novel tells the story of a teacher who escapes gang violence in Haiti and eventually reaches Canada, where he rediscovers what the book describes as “the right to breathe without fear.”
Orélien was born in Gonaïves, Haiti, in 1988 and moved to Montreal in 2010. He later worked as a journalist in Canada.
The author told Libération that he wrote the first draft of the novel in 2019, before generative AI writing tools became widely available.
The dispute has meanwhile reignited questions about the reliability of AI-detection systems. Experts and researchers have raised concerns about the limitations of such tools, meaning that a detector’s result alone does not establish that a text was produced by artificial intelligence.
