Overview
- The publisher Éditions du Boréal announced on Wednesday that an outside review found AI-related tags in the metadata of certain working documents and that it would no longer reprint the book or publish future works by Thélyson Orélien.
- The controversy began in September when a small X account flagged the novel and the AI detector Pangram later reported a 100% probability of computer-generated text, leading the Prix Goncourt to remove the book from its shortlist.
- Boreal gathered all working drafts, commissioned an external analysis and said it still cannot determine exactly how much the technology contributed to the final prose.
- Orélien denies that any sentence in C’était ça ou mourir was generated by a machine, says he used AI tools for historical research and foreign idioms, and has previously acknowledged some past plagiarism in earlier work.
- The dispute underscores limits of current proof: metadata traces and AI detectors offer strong clues but are not universally accepted as definitive, and publishers lack agreed standards for investigating or disclosing AI use in literary work.