Winner of the Prix Goncourt literary prize admits to using AI; The Guardian, November 5, 2026

 Emma Loffhagen, The Guardian; Winner of the Prix Goncourt literary prize admits to using AI

"The winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize has admitted using artificial intelligence while writing his novel, barely a day after collecting an award whose jury had thrown out another book over suspected AI use.

Philippe Jaenada, who won the Prix Goncourt on Tuesday for L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel), told France Inter radio on Wednesday that he had turned to AI “three times” while writing it.

The first, he said, was to slip in a sentence written by ChatGPT in order to “play with the reader”. He said he had revealed which sentence it was only to the Goncourt jurors, on the day of the award. “If it gets out, I’ll know where it came from,” he said.

He also included a section of AI-generated text to poke fun at ChatGPT, which gave “completely absurd answers about a technical detail”, and for research...

The admission comes after the Académie Goncourt removed Thélyson Orélien’s book C’était ça ou Mourir (It Was That or Die) from its longlist in September. The Canadian-Haitian writer’s debut had been the breakout hit of France’s rentrée littéraire – the period between late August and early November which sees many books published in France – selling more than 35,000 copies and winning the Prix du roman Fnac (Fnac novel prize), before the journalist Samuel Fitoussi ran it through the AI-detection tool Pangram and concluded that much of it had been machine-generated. However, the accuracy of AI-detection software has been called into question.

In a statement on 25 September, the academy said analyses by researchers and journalists showed the novel was “in all likelihood very largely the product of an artificial intelligence”. It said it wanted to protect the integrity of a prize that exists to honour “literature written by women and men”, and to send “a clear message” that it did not endorse texts generated with the help of AI...

The contrast has prompted some accusations of a racial double standard online. “So when it’s an old white man it’s fine, but when it’s a young writer of colour he gets stoned in the public square?” one user wrote on X. Another said Jaenada had faced “no media lynching, no banishment” over his use of AI – “a leniency denied to Thélyson Orélien”."

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Publisher cuts ties with Quebec author accused of AI use in award-winning novel; CBC, October 21, 2026

Annabelle Olivier , CBC; Publisher cuts ties with Quebec author accused of AI use in award-winning novel

Thélyson Orélien had denied AI use, admitted to past plagiarism

"Montreal publishing house Éditions du Boréal announced Wednesday it is ending its professional relationship with Thélyson Orélien — a Haitian-born, Quebec-based author. 

In a news release, the publisher said new information, confirmed over the course of recent days, indicates that artificial intelligence was used in the writing process of Orélien's novel, C’était ça ou mourir, published earlier this year."

Acclaimed Author Denies Using A.I. but Admits Plagiarism; The New York Times, October 13, 2026

Ségolène Le Stradic, The New York Times; Acclaimed Author Denies Using A.I. but Admits Plagiarism

"A Haitian-Canadian author accused of literary malpractice — including plagiarizing other writers and using artificial intelligence to write his award-winning new novel — has admitted to the plagiarism but denied using A.I. to write parts of the book.

The author, Thélyson Orélien, apologized in a statement on Tuesday for claiming “as my own texts that are not mine” — a reference to recent accusations that he had plagiarized the content of opinion articles and a short story that he published more than a decade ago.

But Mr. Orélien said that it was “slander and heresy” to claim that he had used A.I. to write parts of “It Was Either That or Die,” a novel published this year to initial acclaim.

“I did use research tools here and there, particularly when it came to foreign idioms,” Mr. Orélien said of writing that book, without clarifying what those tools were. “But no sentence in this book was created by a machine,” he added."