Prize-Shortlisted Novel Faces Unverified AI Authorship Claims

Thelyson Orelien, a Haitian-Canadian author whose debut novel “C’était ça ou mourir” has sold more than 35,000 copies and appeared on longlists for France’s major literary prizes, denies allegations that artificial intelligence wrote the book. The accusations came from an anonymous X account, Balance ton Claude, which said the AI-detection tool Pangram found passages to be almost entirely AI-generated, though the account’s claims and the tool’s reliability have not been independently established. Orelien and his French and Canadian publishers firmly rejected the allegations, with the author attributing disputed stylistic repetitions to Haitian and Caribbean literary traditions and saying he is assembling evidence to support his account. The controversy has sparked a broader debate in France over AI detection, literary originality, race and the treatment of a prominent writer of Haitian origin.