The book "It Was This or Die" by Thélyson Orélien, a phenomenon of the literary season, is accused by an anonymous account of having been written by artificial intelligence. The author denies the accusations.
The novel "C'était ça ou mourir" by Quebecois writer Thélyson Orélien, one of the revelations of the French literary season with over 35,000 copies sold, is at the center of a controversy over the alleged use of artificial intelligence in its writing. The accusation comes from an anonymous account on X, "Balance ton Claude," which claims, using the American detector Pangram, that the text was drafted "almost entirely" by an AI.
The publisher Grasset initially dismissed the accusations as "fake news," while the author, in a statement, attributed the alleged "repetitions" in the text to a Haitian and Caribbean literary tradition. Orélien, whose book is nominated for prestigious awards such as the Goncourt and the Renaudot, also denounced having been the target of "numerous racist attacks" since his arrival in France.
The story begins on Monday, September 21, 2026, when the anonymous account "Balance ton Claude" posts on X an accusation based on analysis from the AI detector Pangram. This tool, presented as "by far the most reliable" with an extremely low false-positive rate, analyzes texts by identifying statistical regularities in word distribution, syntactic structure, and lexical predictability, typical of artificially generated texts.
Thélyson Orélien, 38, of Haitian origin, arrived in France with his novel, presented as an authentic literary voice. The book, currently being translated into over twenty languages, was immediately acclaimed and entered the selections for major French literary prizes. The controversy erupts just as the publishing world is grappling with the proliferation of AI-generated texts, often offered on platforms like Amazon but rarely successful. The publisher Grasset, owned by Vincent Bolloré's Vivendi group, defends the work by asserting it possesses a "true singularity" as opposed to the mediocrity of machine-generated texts. The issue thus raises a broader debate about the boundaries between human creativity, ethnic literary style and automation, and the reliability of detection tools in specific cultural contexts.
"Dentro la Notizia" (Inside the Story) is an amateur, non-profit section of quoz.it, created for people who find it hard to make sense of current affairs without some context. Articles are written with AI assistance from public sources, without a professional newsroom or systematic editorial review: they may contain inaccuracies and are not a substitute for registered news outlets. This is not a registered press outlet under Italian law (L. 62/2001). Images, when not original, come from external sources for illustrative purposes only. If you find an article offensive, inaccurate, or think it should not be published — or you hold rights to a text or image and want it removed — let us know and we will act promptly.
Contact:
info@quoz.it
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Write the first one!