Writer revelation of literary rent in France denies having used AI

“ Si liked the creation and writing, I don’t see why I would resort to a machine”, the author reacted, in statements to the newspaper Libération, claiming to be “constituting a dossier”, along with its editors, “to prove” that it was he who wrote the work.

The 38-year-old author has been the target of attacks following accusations launched on Monday by the anonymous account “Balance ton Claude”, on social network X, until then practically unknown and with 92 followers, who stated that the novel had been written “almost fully” by Artificial Intelligence.

The account also indicates having used the North American detection program Pangram to analyze excerpts from the work, which has already won the award Romance Fnac 2026 and sold more than 35,000 copies, according to Le Figaro.

According to AFP, it was not possible to verify the identity of the person behind the account.

This publication was later shared over a thousand times and accumulated more than three million views.

“ My traditions are Haitian and Caribbean. The images, repetitions and rhythms are a living word, they are mine”, added the author, which is published in France by Grasset.

In a statement sent to AFP, the publisher expressed herself “firmly against any ill-intentioned claims that support categorically that the book would have been fed or written by an AI, and that seriously hurt a writer with an exceptional path”.

Boréal, the publisher who originally published the novel in Canada, in the spring, told AFP to “take note of the allegations” and not to “play them lightly”, expressing, however, its “confidence in Thélyson Orélien’s work”.

“C’était ça or mourir” is one of the successes of the literary ‘rentrée’ of Grasset, which was prepared by Executive President Olivier Nora before she was removed, in April, by the direction of Hachette, the largest French publisher (which belongs to Grasset), integrated into the sphere of conservative multimillionaire Vincent Bolloré.

At the time Thélyson Orélien publicly expressed his support for Olivier Nora.

“I did not write this novel with my head, but with my guts and heart,” the author recently told AFP, explaining that he had talked with numerous Haitians who lived the experience of exile.

In the novel, he tells in the first person the story of Jonas Dorléon, a professor of History and Geography who flees his country, immersed in gang violence.

Then a dangerous journey through 12 countries begins to reach Canada.

The charges of the account “Balance ton Claude” were launched on Monday, the same day that the writer received the Fnac Award for best novel.

The book also includes the selections of major French literary awards, including Goncourt, Medicis and Femina.

The AFP submitted the excerpts selected by the X account to other detectors, obtaining different results.

With the InVID-WeVerify verification tool co-created by AFP, the evaluation indicates that these passages were “very likely written by a human being.”.

The conclusions of seven other detectors – Winston AI, detecting-ai. with, app.its-ai.org, detectgpt.com, isgen.ai, copyleaks. with and ghostbuster. app -, also tested by AFP, are divergent.

One of them concluded that there is a 100% probability of these passages being the work of an AI (app.its-ai.org), while two others reached the inverse conclusion (detectgpt.com and isgen.ai).

Two other detectors indicated AI writing probabilities between 7% and 59% (detecting-ai.com and ghostbuster.app).

The remaining two (Winston AI and copyleaks.com) concluded that there were respectively 53% and 100% probability of one of the passages being generated by AI and 0% from the other.

For Denis Teyssou, responsible for AFP Medialab, “text detection is much more random” than image detection.

This is because, if image generators leave traces or use watermarking, “a text is just words and punctuation. There is no signal processing in the text, there is only a statistical distribution of words”, used to determine the probability of AI traces, he added.

The Pangram “should never be the final referee,” but should act as a starting point for further investigation, stressed the executive president and co-founder of the tool, Max Spero, in statements to the American magazine The Atlantic, in an article published in May.