Controversy surrounding the novel by Thélyson Orélien, accused of having been written by an AI

“Literary phenomenon of the year” for Fnac, “back-to-school sensation” for Livres Hebdo, a “powerful” novel for Le Monde. Monday, September 21, the French press and literary critics were almost unanimous: Thélyson Orélien, a Quebec writer of Haitian origin previously unknown to the general public, has just signed It Was That or Die, a little masterpiece in the French language. Just crowned with the Fnac Novel Prize and present in the first selections of Goncourt, Renaudot, Femina and Médicis, the novel experienced the same triumph in Quebec, where it established itself in March as the biggest success of Éditions du Boréal in more than 60 years.

But since Tuesday, a controversy has been growing on social networks. A few hours after the announcement of the selection of Thélyson Orélien's novel for the Prix du Roman Fnac, an As proof, the account relies on the results of Pangram, an AI detector developed by an American start-up, whose error rate would only be “0.0041%, or approximately one human text in 24,400”, again according to this anonymous user. “Fake news”, for its part, brushes aside Grasset, the publisher of the novel, who questions the reliability of the tool, and even wonders if the fact that Thélyson Orélien is “black and Haitian” might not have something to do with this cabal.

Instructive precedents

The Thélyson Orélien affair, which has yet to be elucidated, poses a fundamental question: can we really detect whether a text is the work of a human or the product of an AI?…