Writer Thelyson Orelien accused of using AI

Canadian writer of Haitian origin Thelyson Orelien is at the center of controversy after being accused on social media platform X of using artificial intelligence (AI) to write his novel C’était ça ou mourir, which is considered one of the major successes of France’s new literary season, AFP reported Tuesday.

The accusation was made Monday by the user behind the account “Balance ton Claude,” which had previously been little known and had 92 followers. The user claimed that the novel was written “almost entirely” by artificial intelligence. The account said it had used the American detection software Pangram to analyze several excerpts from the novel, CE Report quotes AGERPRES.

The post has since gone viral, being reposted more than 1,000 times and accumulating more than 3 million views.

Grasset, the novel’s publisher in France, has not commented on the allegations. The administrators of Pangram have also declined to comment.

Boreal, the Montreal-based publisher that released the novel in Canada this spring, told AFP that it was “aware of the allegations” and that it “does not take them lightly.”

However, the Canadian publisher said that “the confidence of the Boreal team in Thelyson Orelien’s work remains intact.”

AFP journalists checked the excerpts selected by the X account using other AI-detection programs and obtained varying results.

Using InVID-WeVerify, a verification tool co-created by AFP, the assessment indicated that the excerpts were “very likely written by a human.”

However, the findings from seven other AI-detection tools — Winston AI, detecting-ai.com, app.its-ai.org, detectgpt.com, isgen.ai, copyleaks.com and ghostbuster.app — were divergent.

One of them, app.its-ai.org, concluded that there was a 100% probability that the paragraphs had been created by artificial intelligence, while two detection programs, detectgpt.com and isgen.ai, reached the opposite conclusion.

Two others, detecting-ai.com and ghostbuster.app, produced AI-writing probabilities ranging from 7% to 59% for the same excerpts from the book. The final two, Winston AI and copyleaks.com, estimated a 53% and 100% probability, respectively, that one of the targeted paragraphs had been generated by AI, while assigning a 0% probability to another excerpt.

C’était ça ou mourir is among the novels in the new literary season prepared at Grasset by its former CEO, Olivier Nora, before he was dismissed in April by the management of Hachette, France’s largest publishing group, which operates within the sphere of influence of billionaire Vincent Bolloré.

The allegations made by the “Balance ton Claude” account emerged Monday, the same day Thelyson Orelien won the Fnac Prize for best novel.

The book also appears among France’s top-selling titles and has been included in the selections for several major French literary prizes, including the Goncourt, Médicis and Femina.

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