A Canadian publisher has cut ties with top-selling novelist Thélyson Orélien after finding traces of artificial intelligence in his drafts, even while admitting it may never know how much machine assistance was actually involved. The 38-year-old Haitian Canadian writer had earned critical acclaim for his novel C’était ça ou mourir (It Was Either That or Die), but publisher Les Éditions du Boréal announced that new evidence confirmed AI was used in the writing process.
The controversy began last month when the novel was dropped from France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt prize list after an automated tool estimated a 100 percent probability of computer-generated text. Boréal initially defended the author, but later collected working versions of the manuscript and hired an independent specialist to review them. The analysis found digital AI tags hidden in document metadata.
Orélien has strongly denied letting software write his book, calling the claims slander. While he acknowledged using digital tools for historical research and translating foreign idioms, he insisted that every sentence, structure, and idea came entirely from himself. He pointed out that he began writing the 300-page manuscript in 2017 and completed a full draft in 2019, years before modern AI chatbots such as ChatGPT became widely available.
The publisher said it attempted to cooperate with Orélien to gather evidence to prove his innocence, but the author eventually declined to supply additional documents. Before the scandal unfolded, the migration-themed novel had been slated for translation in more than 20 countries, leaving both readers and the publishing industry facing unresolved questions about where research ends and machine authorship begins.