2026 seemed like a promising year for Haïti-born, Montréal-based author Thélyson Orélien. His debut novel, «C'était ça ou mourir» ('It was that or death'), tells the story of a Haitian history teacher who must flee Port-au-Prince amid the gang violence. His journey takes him over the border into the Dominican Republic, and then through large swaths of South America, before ending up in the United States and being met with Trump's ICE agents, to eventually end up in Canada.
Captivating, poetic and heartwrenching, the novel is on the list of nearly every literary prize in France, including the Goncourt, the most prestigious of them all. Monday, it won the people's choixe award at the Prix FNAC, but that celebration was short-lived.
On X (formerly Twitter), an account accused Orélien of having used artificial intelligence to write the best-seller. On both sides of the Atlantic, authors, journalists and public figures were quick to come to Orélien's defence, notably claiming that AI-verification tools, which themselves use AI, can hallucinate. The AFP submitted excerpts from the novel to several such AI agents, to wildly varying results, with some claiming that it was ''almost certainly written by a human''. Accusations of racism and jealousy were also brought up by the author's staunch defenders.
While we still don't have a clear answer as to whether or not Thélyson Orélien did use generative AI to write his novel (the author and his publisher, Grasset, vehemently deny the accusations), he is nonetheless being haunted by a history of plagiarism.
An investigation from Montréal newspaper La Presse found that short stories published by the author at the beginning of the 2010s contained word-for-word passages lifted from other authors and writers. «Où va le monde?», which Orélien published in 2012, was found to essentially be a rewriting of the preface to Louis Pauwel's 1964 novel The Morning of the Magicians. In 2013, an opinion piece published in La Presse itself lifted from sports writer Andy Bautista's article published in English in the Philippines five days earlier. Their investigation discovered a number of other instances where Orélien simply translated and adapted other writers' work and appropriated it as his own.
Les Éditions du Boréal, the author's editor, told La Presse that it took the situation very seriously and was conducting its own investigation. “We continue to make every effort, both with the author and internally, to fully investigate the allegations that the author used generative AI to write C’était ça ou mourir,” said the editor.
As generative AI continues to gain ground in nearly every aspect of our lives, the arts, in particular, will be a big part of the conversation. Last May, Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region for "The Serpent in the Grove," a story he published in Granta magazine. Soon after, the author was accused of using artificial intelligence to write it. In the music world, artists such as Tyga and Fenix Flexin have admitted to using AI tools to craft songs on their latest projects.
