AUTHOR THELYSON ORELIEN BREAKS SILENCE ON AI-WRITTEN NOVEL SCANDAL

Bestselling Haitian-Canadian writer Thelyson Orelien has denied allegations that he used artificial intelligence to write his breakthrough debut novel, while admitting to past plagiarism “mistakes” and offering an apology.

Orelien, 38, came under scrutiny over his French-language novel about migration, C’était ça ou mourir (It Was Either That or Die), which was scheduled for translation into more than 20 countries.

The controversy has led to the book’s withdrawal from the shortlist for France’s prestigious Goncourt Prize after tests conducted with the AI detection tool Pangram indicated a 100 per cent probability that the novel contained computer-generated text.

In his first detailed response to the allegations, Orelien dismissed the claims as false in a statement sent exclusively to Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Tuesday.

“They say that ‘C’était ça ou mourir’ was written by an artificial intelligence. That’s slander and heresy,” he wrote.

The author acknowledged using digital tools for research, particularly to understand foreign expressions, but insisted that no part of the novel was generated by AI.

“Here and there I did use tools for research, particularly for foreign idioms. But not a single sentence in this book was created by a machine, nor the meaning or the structure of a story that comes from my gut,” he said.

During the height of the controversy last month, Orelien had promised to respond when the situation calmed down and provide evidence that he wrote the novel without AI assistance.

In his latest statement, he said he began writing the book in late 2017, initially working at the corner of a table, before completing a first draft of more than 300 pages in 2019.

His account places the initial writing several years before the emergence of AI-powered text-generation services such as ChatGPT.

However, Orelien has yet to make his early drafts publicly available, while his Canadian publisher, Boreal, has said it cannot definitively confirm or dismiss the allegations of AI use.

The controversy has become one of the most prominent AI-related disputes in the literary world, reigniting debate over the use of artificial intelligence in creative writing and the reliability of tools designed to identify machine-generated text.

Although Pangram is regarded as one of the more reliable AI detection tools, tests conducted by AFP using other detectors produced varying results. Some classified excerpts from the novel as likely human-written, while others indicated that they were entirely AI-generated.

Beyond the AI allegations, Orelien also addressed reports of plagiarism involving a newspaper column and a short story he wrote before publishing his debut novel.

While he did not identify specific cases, he acknowledged making what he described as “unacceptable mistakes” and expressed remorse.

“I was just over 20, I was probably a little too impatient, without really understanding how much I still had to learn. I wanted to write; I was reading a lot… But admiring someone does not give you the right to take, to claim as mine texts that are not my own,” he wrote.

“I deeply regret it and offer my heartfelt apologies without reservation.”

Orelien fled his native Haiti following the devastating 2010 earthquake that struck the Caribbean nation, which had already been grappling with widespread poverty and political instability.