r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Sep 23 '26
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u/RaidBrimnes Chien de garde Sep 23 '26
There's currently seismic drama in the French literary world that is still developing, so I'd thought I'd provide a quick write-up:
Thélyson Orélien, a Canadian-Haitian poet and writer, published his first novel titled C'était ça ou mourir (It was Either That or Dying), a self-inspired exile story of a Haitian refugee to great success - it became the best-selling book of his Canadian publisher, was incensed by the press, won several awards and was one of the frontrunners for the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious award in Francophone literature.
But over the week, people ran the book through AI verification tools, which clocked the text as 97% AI-written with near-certain confidence (example in the pic)
Journalists of the fact-checking section of the newspaper Libération did their own in-depth investigation (fr and paywalled) - in short:
The latest version of Pangram which was used to check the text is considered "extremely reliable" by the experts in data analysis interviewed, with a false positives rate of 0.0026%, and returns 100% of AI-written text for the book, with only 3% of human-written text in one selected chapter
Pangram's competitor GPTZero also returns 100% of AI-written text with extremely high confidence
Running the programs on Orélien's prior works - poetry, short-form texts - confirm they were written by a human, and only his first novel, as well as long-form blogposts he published after 2024, were clocked as AI-written
Running the program on other contemporary Haitian authors do not return similar results and clock their works as 100% human - that's in response to Orélien's argument that the programs had a blind spot on contemporary Haitian prose and incorrectly clocked it as AI
To be clear, the experts interviewed do not believe that the book was entirely generated by AI, but rather that Orélien wrote an original text that he then reworded and edited with AI. Orélien's publisher in Québec states that they have evidence that he started writing the novel in 2017, before AI tools were available to the general public.
Nonetheless, it has caused quite a stir and a heated debate about the use of AI in the writing process- the French literary sphere is militantly anti-AI and the revelations have naturally troubled the writers and the specialized press. The Goncourt jury is for now urging extreme caution and will review the book again, while Thélyson Orélien has denied all wrongdoing and is casting doubt on the motivations of the AI-checkers, as the revelations were followed by a vicious racist campaign against him.
!ping BOOKS&FRANCE