Haitian-Canadian author Thélyson Orélien has denied allegations that artificial intelligence was used to write substantial portions of his debut novel, C’était ça ou mourir (It Was Either That or Die), after the book won the prestigious Prix du Roman Fnac in France.
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The 38-year-old writer has pushed back against claims circulating online that passages from the novel were generated by artificial intelligence, describing the allegation as an attack on his work and maintaining that the book was entirely his own creation.
The controversy began after an X account known as Balance ton Claude said it analysed several passages from the novel using Pangram, an AI-detection tool.
According to the account, several extracts taken from different sections of the manuscript produced the same result.
“We tested several passages, from different bits of the manuscript, to come up with the identical result: 100 per cent AI,” the group claimed.
It described Pangram as “by far the most accurate” AI-detection programme and suggested there was only a negligible possibility that the result was wrong.
Orélien, however, categorically denied relying on artificial intelligence to produce the novel.
“I have always loved creation and literature. I can’t see why I would feel compelled to use a machine,” he told French newspaper Libération, according to the BBC.
The author said he was now working with his publishers in France and Canada to prepare documentation intended to demonstrate that he personally wrote the book.
“My traditions are Haitian and Caribbean. The images, the repetitions and the rhythms are the living word, they are my own,” Orélien said.
His French publisher, Grasset, has also stood behind him, describing the allegations as “atrociously injurious to a writer with an exceptional life-story” and insisting that the novel was original and powerful.
The dispute has cast a shadow over what had otherwise been a major literary breakthrough for Orélien.
His debut novel recently won the Prix du Roman Fnac, one of France’s significant literary awards, and has also been shortlisted for the Goncourt and Renaudot prizes.
The book has attracted wider international attention for its story of displacement, violence and migration.
It follows a teacher who escapes gang violence in Haiti and eventually reaches Canada, where he rediscovers what the novel describes as “the right to breathe without fear.”
Orélien was born in Gonaïves, Haiti, in 1988 and relocated to Montreal in 2010. He later worked as a journalist in Canada before emerging as a novelist.
In defending himself against the AI allegations, Orélien said the first draft of the book had been written in 2019, years before generative artificial intelligence tools became widely available to the public.
That timeline forms a central part of his response to the allegation that the novel was largely produced by AI.
The controversy has also revived wider concerns about the reliability of AI-detection software.
While such tools attempt to identify linguistic patterns associated with machine-generated text, their results are not in themselves conclusive proof that a piece of writing was produced by artificial intelligence.
That distinction is particularly important in Orélien’s case because the allegation currently rests on the outcome of an AI-detection tool and has not been independently established as fact.
For now, Orélien maintains that the distinctive language, rhythm, imagery and repetition in the novel reflect his Haitian and Caribbean literary traditions rather than machine-generated writing.
His publishers have backed that position, while the author says he is assembling evidence to substantiate his authorship.
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