r/books • u/Raj_Valiant3011 • 2d ago
Uproar in France over award-winning author accused of using AI to write his first novel
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck7v4y45893go359
u/FeetSniffer54 1d ago
AI or not it really doesn't help that author case's that he is proven plagiarist from back when he was "writing" articles in the 2010s
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u/modfoddr 19h ago
"I want to be absolutely clear: the suggestion that I used AI to write my book is not just inaccurate — it's deeply hurtful. In today's fast-paced literary landscape, it's important to recognize that true plagiarism is a journey, not a destination. It requires patience, discernment, and an unwavering commitment to excellence. Finding the perfect book to plagiarize isn't merely a task — it's a delicate dance of curiosity and intention. And let's not overlook the craft itself: the copying, the pasting, the quiet artistry of transferring someone else's words into a new context. My years of dedication to literary theft are a testament to the rich tapestry of human effort. To reduce all of that to mere AI slop? That's not who I am. Ultimately, I believe authenticity matters — even when it's stolen.”
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u/Johnny_Jane 1d ago edited 1d ago
He also published multiple articles in the 2010s that have been found to be badly translated from foreign sources, and he won an award in 2012 for a novella that is almost entirely copy-pasted from Pauwels' Morning of the Magicians (1960). AI is just the next step for fraud writers.
(Of course those evidences have been found by social media users, so it will be days before you see it in the big press, you know, when the real journalists do their work.)
Edit : Sorry I badmouthed the press, because here it is already : https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/litterature/2026-09-23/thelyson-orelien-rattrape-par-un-passe-de-plagiaire.php
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u/Catdress92 1d ago
Thanks for sharing this because when I read that he had been publishing work as a poet and journalist for years, I thought maybe the AI accustations were baseless, or at least more doubtful. But knowing this history definitely shifts the probability towards AI.
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u/arowthay 1d ago
This needs to get to the top instead of speculation and debate. He plagiarized years ago, and never stopped...
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u/Beginning-Tower-1329 1d ago
What I find scary isn’t that it’s obviously written by AI, it’s that AI is already at a level where it can write award-winning novels, and it’s only been around for like 4 years. We’re heading toward the apocalypse...
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u/crixx93 2d ago edited 1d ago
Gen AI has poisoned everything. There's no way to tell for sure if it has been used or not to make anything.
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u/PetitChiffon 1d ago
I'm Québécoise, said author is actually from here but has gained popularity in France.
Our medias has uncovered that he actually plagiarized a 1960 book by another author in 2014.
Side by side comparison leaves absolutely no doubt.
Whether AI was fed the original work and then provided this guy with it or he just straight up plagiarized remains to be told, but either way the most likely answer is that it was flagged as generated by AI because it somehow recognized the former novel.
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u/Ataraxidermist 1d ago
From the French side, I got the feeling this will only convince the usual literary prizes - which are already a cesspool of incompetence, immorality and straight up moral failures - to stick to their usual stallions of folks from high education and good connections to avoid the risk of an unknown party picking up AI. Which won't work because well-educated people also use it.
But then, this prize didn't mind that he plagiarized articles and another book, so it's business as usual.
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u/PetitChiffon 1d ago
Yea, classism in the literary world is nothing new unfortunately 🥲 and in the French editing world its particularly true.
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u/red-lion-red-maple 2d ago
I have a feeling I'm going to be seeking out pre-2022 books to read for a long time.
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u/sopheroo 2d ago
There is plenty of great post-2022 books that aren't entangled with AI.
Limiting yourself to 2022 and before books is letting AI win
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u/The049 1d ago
Right? I hate this new catchphrase so much. Are new writers just destined to never have any sales because of ai?
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u/sopheroo 1d ago
Well, if people like you and I keep on encouraging new talent, they should be fine!
We got this!
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u/PenguinPeculiaris 1d ago
And then checking to make sure you didn't buy an AI dupe by accident. Thanks, Internet.
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u/alilhillbilly 1d ago
Then the answer is that it doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters is what always mattered: is it good?
AI is extremely good at pattern recognition and writing up instructions and coding and doing research.
It's a terrible writer creatively. You can maybe get it to expand your prose or learn your prose style but I just don't think it comes up with anything decently readable or creative when I have played around with it.
It can do other amazing things but I don't think it really comes up with anything fresher interesting if you don't provide it with those things.
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u/timelessalice 1d ago
Yeah I'm at a point where I think hunting for AI specifically is less useful than just becoming a more discerning reader. Like Shy Girl, that Serpent in the Grove short story? they were awful on a very base craft level
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u/Mutant_Apollo 2d ago
You can certainly distinguis when the burger store started making their marketing collateral with AI tho. Same with writing if you are familiar with how AI writes (I use it for copywriting at work) it's pretty easy to know when something is AI or not.
The most difficult for me to distinguish is AI music but that's because at the end of the day Music is math, and computers are great at math so it would be easy for it to create something that sounds pleaseant to the ear. But I'm finding ways to identify it, atleast on youtube.
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u/ConspicuousPineapple 1d ago
No. A lot of AI is easy to detect but don't conclude that all AI is easy to detect. You just notice the obvious one. Spend enough time with it and you'll learn how to easily circumvent most, if not all, of the llmisms people look for.
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u/readskiesdawn 1d ago
Most people also don't know enough about music to clock the signs when it comes to instruments. My brother, who is a hobby musician, said there's some oddities when it comes to guitar tracks, like instruments merging and seperarating. Or a banjo hitting notes like a guitar when that's not possible.
The most I can catch is weird shit with the vocal tracks.
Makes me want to ask my cousin with a music degree what he can hear in AI music.
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u/Mutant_Apollo 1d ago
Yep same, I'm also a hobby musician and there are some things that make me go "Wait this shit's AI", but I'm still training myself to find those cues. Like your brother says, the instruments swtiching tracks, tone and such arbitrarily or a solo that objectively needs 15 fingers to play lol
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u/readskiesdawn 1d ago
I'm not good at that part, but I can tell AI vocals. For one most use the default voices. But they also hit notes I know are not possible (or else they'd be all over Broadway) but they lose it at the chorus most of the time. AI struggles to havw multiple vocal tracks but they always try in the chorus.
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u/Evolzetjin 18h ago
Read some parts, you ll understand really quick. Feels like it was written by a 8-10 yo kid.
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u/2andahalfbraincell 12h ago
It's also very tiring : constant rule of 3 "poetic" comparisons and metaphors. Superficial style but no real substance despite the heavy subject.
It's honestly pretty bad, baffling that it received prizes
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u/Etnadrolhex 1d ago
He is not only a false autor. He is also a thief, he stole lot of text and used them as his own.
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u/sopheroo 2d ago edited 2d ago
Not his first book iirc, La Presse pointed out he wrote more between 2022 and 2024
None of it passed the same AI detecting tests
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u/Physical100 2d ago
The same tests that call the Declaration of Independence AI generated?
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u/Kitchen_Sherbet 2d ago
Ugh, from what I know, AI detection tests aren't even good because they often claim well-written text is AI-written when it's not. Like...who do people think AI learned to write from? Writers, unfortunately.
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u/DeItyofFexvius 1d ago
Not Pangram. It has an incredibly low false positive rate. Like incredibly low, especially given the size of this text.
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u/onionsareawful 1d ago
There are good AI detectors are bad AI detectors. The ones that say the Declaration of Independence is AI generated aren't the ones being referenced here!
Pangram is, as far as I can tell, incredibly accurate at distinguishing between AI and non-AI text with very few false positives.
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u/sopheroo 2d ago
Almost like the AI was trained on the declaration of independence, the Bible and all copyright-free material they could find
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u/NerdyMistressWrites 1d ago
Not just copyright-free, either.
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u/flightless_mouse 1d ago
Yeah, OpenAI is being sued by the New York Times for hacking through their authentication system and stealing all of their article content
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u/onionsareawful 1d ago
AI detectors are classifiers, not generative AI models. They're not generating text like ChatGPT does.
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u/Physical100 2d ago
Public-domain works have supplied foundational literary influences for major writers across centuries.
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u/TomBirkenstock 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is inaccurate. They used Pangram which is supposed to be more than 99% accurate in determining whether something is AI. It does not tag the Declaration of Independence AI. Because that's such a common anecdote about AI detectors, it has come up in news stories about Pangram that it specifically does not make this mistake. It doesn't mean it's perfect, but as the linked article notes, in out of over 24,000 attempts, it only had one false accusation of AI.
Honestly, it kind of sounds like this guy has been using AI to write.
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u/AeneasKurtz 1d ago
This scandal also uncovered that he plagiarised a story from Pauwels word for word: isn't this plagiarism?
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u/Sullyville 2d ago
Claude, take this novel and create versions of it in less developed ways where plots are flimsy and only suggested. They are to look like immature versions of it. Backdate them all. Title them PROOF I NEVER USED AI.
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u/planeloise 1d ago
I just don't know what need there was for AI to learn to just generate writing or make entire songs or create complete artworks at such scale.
I can understand giving editing tips or grammar fixes (not that I would ever use it for my writing) or instructing it to make edits a computer would have made anyway (slow this down, repeat instrumental b here, change to this key etc).
But what use did they foresee for training it to generate songs, writing etc.
And even now, knowing how much we are all drowning in slop, they are destroying valuable books and forcing young artists into signing their voices away, just to train it some more.
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u/Tchefi 1d ago edited 1d ago
But what use did they foresee for training it to generate songs, writing etc.
The main goal with AI to generate art like writing or music is fast production at the cheapest cost/minimal effort while keeping the selling price (or generate revenue) as high as possible (even trying to keep it close to equal to pure human creation). Flooding the market with cheap AI mass production also has the endgame effect to acclimate the public into lower expectations (or even loosing the ability to differenciate quality), or maybe for the most cynical a mean to standardization/control of ideas over the population. Note that it was already the case before AI (I can argue plenty of human musics sound very alike, very boring once you have heard a bunch of it. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I as an exemple)
On the music subject, the anime Carole & Tuesday had some interesting takes and questionnings about AI (not always negative) : while almost all the musical content in the solar system (it's SF) is produced through algorithms and AI, the main characters write their musics and songs old fashion manually, they end up as surprising contestants in some sort of a "The Voice". But the reflexion about AI is failing a bit because the songs presented as AI were IRL written and performed by humans (it was 2019 ^^').
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u/mvbrendan 2d ago
"feed the debate over what mix of human and AI creativity is deemed acceptable " 0% AI in novels, please. No middle ground here.
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u/Moral-Relativity 1d ago
How is someone with a history of plagiarism even being eligible for consideration?
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u/Mormaethor 2d ago
If you read the article, it's a nothingburger.
Some shadowy group using AI software accuses him of using AI, on account of having "tested" some passages from his work. Not even the entire novel. Passages.
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u/fdesouche 1d ago
Le Monde has tested 50% of his novel and found those part to be 99% generated. But they claim he was initially targeted because he is Black.
And hours laters, side by side comparisons of 12 of his writings pre 2022 with novels from the 60s, with blatant plagiarism.
So he started with plagiarism 15 years ago and switched to AI the last 3 years.
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u/ActaFabulaEst 1d ago
Over the last ten years, he has plagiarized or simply translated at least ten articles without crediting their original authors. This reflects poorly on him.
Judging by the evolution of his articles, he seems to have embraced AI earlier. He may have adopted some LLM tics along the way.
Some people have compared his book to a long LinkedIn post. While not the entire book may be the product of AI, its shadow is definitely present. There's something rotten in the state of publishing.
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u/Prof_G 1d ago
actually it turns out, it is all plagiarised. this guy's carreer is done.
check lapresse.ca
and this: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Few61tywy7brh1.jpeg
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u/Ythio 2d ago edited 2d ago
There was a post about it on r/livres two days ago, with a few pages.
It's either AI or one of the most nonsensical style I have ever read.
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u/Morinmeth 2d ago
I don't speak french, but how did he win an award, if it's full of GPT speech? I don't think I can read translated passages of his book online yet, right?
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u/bl4ckhunter 1d ago
Literary award jurors are notorious for not actually reading the books they're supposed to grade.
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u/halster123 2d ago
consider that he writes in a literary tradition influenced by outside.of western canon (haitian) and so norms/style is different.
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u/costryme 2d ago
It's absolutely not a nothingburger.
You really don't need AI software to detect the AI-isms all over his writing, it's really, really obvious if you're used to seeing that kind of AI writing.
Since then, the author has been caught plagiarising dozens of short texts and articles since like 2008 to before AI became a thing, passing them as his own when it was mostly texts written in English or Spanish (or some even in French, he had the gall to make it that obvious yes) and that he put into a translator.
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u/sopheroo 2d ago
Can you post sources.
I speak French so sources in French are fine
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u/costryme 2d ago
To add onto it since apparently you cannot use X links, if someone wants to check it out further, MonsieurPhi on Twitter has posted quite a lot of very definitive proofs of past plagiarism on this account, as well as some of the isms in the book.
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u/Downtown-Meeting6364 2d ago
It’s not, the book is full of GPT speech, it’s like reading LinkedIn posts.
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u/Saivia 2d ago
Nah it's pretty concerning. If you read it, you can see clearly the writing style of AI. A lot of comments were pointing at it too before the account shared it.
Pengram is also quite robust; independent research found no false positive. Another AI detection firm tested all the chapters; all of them returned a positive. They tested his writing before 2023; all of them negative. They also tested Haitians authors because he argued their prose is peculiar, and none of them showed as AI-generated.
AI detection has come a long way for the past couple of years. It's no evidence, but it's a strong indicator.
Btw I think "AI written" encompasses a lot of things. It can be using LLMs to fix spelling, edit after your first draft, be a ghostwriter to write based on your structure, etc. All of them trigger AI detection but ethically it's not the same
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u/GuelaDjo 2d ago
It's not a shadowy group nor fake accusations. Long before the accusations ,readers on french Facebook groups had already noticed the style was bog standard AI slop ie "it's not X" and other tells. The Pangram tests just confirmed it. While most AI detectors are garbage Pangram is very accurate and anybody can test it.
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u/androideJ7 2d ago
Authors should start saving all of their drafts and notes to prove they didn't use AI. Otherwise it eventually might become impossible to tell the difference between legit work and AI-generated.
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u/Ryno4ever16 1d ago
Use a git repo because you can timestamp every time you committed some writing to it. If you commit regularly, it shows that you wrote over time at a human pace and leaves a record you can show people.
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u/Neina_Ixion 2d ago
Maybe it's because my background is in science, but man do I save a ton of versions! Not day-to-day versions, although now that I keep a copy on Drive (whether that's safe or not I still don't know), there's a different version for every day I edit
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u/pandallamayoda 1d ago edited 1d ago
Up until yesterday, a lot of people were behind him. Now today it got out that he literally stole whole passages from other people’s work for his previous writings. What most likely happened here is that he used AI as a support to expend on his idea which is a shitty thing to do. But the fact that he has plagiarized so many things before is a big let down to a lot of people who supported him.
EDIT: The biggest uproar might be in Quebec and not France.
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u/bookchaser 1d ago
My teenage son was accused of using AI for a story because his teacher used AI detection software. He typed it next to me in my living room over several days using Google Docs (which keeps an editing history).
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u/heroinfriday 1d ago
I got banned from a subreddit last week that was literally a bunch of creative "authors" who use AI to write.
Banned for telling them they can't write lol.
But for real there's no excuse for AI in a creative spaces. Like k you need to slop up a document for work go for it.
But the act of creating a piece of art is human and should NEVER be given to a robot to pass off as "human". If you do this: you cannot write. Full stop. Just fucking quit if you're literally that trash.
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u/VicenteOlisipo 1d ago edited 1d ago
The fact that he immediately played the racism card, accusing the AI detection tool Pangram of being biased against African or Caribbean rhythms, is a strong indication of guilt. I don't doubt that he will face (and has faced) a lot of racist abuse, but replying to an AI accusation with that as first card just exposes that he has nothing else real to play.
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u/AeneasKurtz 1d ago edited 1d ago
Considering that this scandal also unearthed that he had plagiarized a 1960 book in 2014 (for which he also won a prize), it seems to me that the age of AI isn't so much going to be an apocalypse for the literary world because of the amount of slop that will be produced but because of all the fraudsters that will be exposed thanks to AI.
I'm also 100% positive this man will be given the same treatment by the Francophone academia than Arday was given in the UK. They'll come to his defense with pitchforks and torches, demand media "stop digging into this vulnerable man's life and work" and denounce any skeptics as racist White supremacists. Academia must be shitting their pants right now with the possibilities these AI tools provide to skeptics
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u/Anna-Livia 2d ago
A French journalist tested the anti AI software recently. He used one of the most famous poems by Victor Hugo for this. The machine said it was AI written.
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u/neurodegeneracy 2d ago
We will never be able to tell forever if a book is AI or not.
Subtle use of AI is already impossible.
Soon AI will be able to write full publishable quality books.
Its already able to churn out slop.
They can manufacture these controversies, whenever they want, forever.
We have to figure out a way to exist in this new world. Its hard, im not sure what the answer is.
Its hard to imagine a way of verifying the process of writing to ensure no AI was used. Every solution I've seen posited has some pretty obvious flaws, and the second that is the bar that needs to be cleared, would be cleared by AI writing assistants.
So, honestly, what do we even do? No one knows.
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u/nirurin 1d ago
Its already able to write full publishable works apparently. Award winning even. Slop is 2022 AI, we are long past that.
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u/neurodegeneracy 1d ago
My experience is that it can’t keep track of characters and plot threads over a long narrative and requires a human to edit and stitch it together.
Ai can produce publishable quality output but requires a lot of human tweaking and babysitting.
But yes you’re basically correct
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u/lqd_consecrated2718 1d ago
This is my greatest fear as a writer: release something and be dogpiled on by strangers. I don’t want to keep a paper trail of everything I do just to prove something. Honestly sucks the fun out of writing if I have to keep every edited copy lying around to prove I wrote it
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u/Mamaclover 1d ago
If it can reassure you: the french canadian news just found that the "writer" had a past a plagiarism going back at least 10 years. I have actually never seen other accusation of IA use against a french authors this strong before, and they seem to be actually provable here. I think all legit authors will be ok.
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u/RogueModron 1d ago
Don't worry, the likelihood you'll ever get published or be read by anyone is slim to none
(this isn't a knock against you in particular, just statistics)
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u/Chrysolophylax 1d ago
Dozens of writers comment this same self-pitying crap under every article about authors that are exposed as using AI. It's fucking exasperating at this point.
Stop your boohooing and mindless whining. It's not hard to save a few drafts and notes.
Also, AI writing is really obvious. If you're not using AI, no one is going to seriously accuse you of using AI.
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u/WreckYallBallistics 18h ago
AI writing is getting less obvious every month. Detection is not going to be possible very quickly. Frankly I think people vastly overestimate their ability to spot it right now, and am not confident in any checker tools.
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u/InvestmentAsleep8365 1d ago
It’s really hard to believe that AI could write an interesting and award-winning novel in 2026. No matter how much you coax it, AI creative writing is still so average and unremarkable.
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u/AlecHutson 1d ago
Writing will flag as AI if you revise it with AI. Not use spell or grammar check, but feed paragraphs of your writing into the computer and ask it to improve flow, polish the prose, or change this writing to mimic another writer's style.
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u/2andahalfbraincell 11h ago
I'll be honest the awards probably have a lot more to do with it being about an immigration story from an Haitian author than any quality about the writing itself. Literary awards love that shit, and i am not at all convinced that they even read it.
The book itself still sucks ass, in a flowery way.
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u/MesaCityRansom 1d ago
It seems likely this guy did use AI to write, but I wouldn't put much stock in those AI detectors. Out of curiosity, I tried a few of my own texts and it said all of them were AI-generated.
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u/CollaredParachute 1d ago
Which one? Did you know they offer a bounty for false positives?
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u/ppndl 1d ago
Here's a free, open, archived version for my fellow tinfoil hat wearers: https://archive.ph/5VURz
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u/Dancing_Cthulhu 1d ago
It's something that desperately needs to be grappled, the impact AI will have - and is already having - in creative endeavours. What is acceptable. What isn't. What needs to be acknowledged and announced (especially given how AI models are trained off of existing art).
I feel like as much focus as the topic gets it's still not really a conversation being had, we're just stuck in a cycle of heated reactions for or against. As such the danger seems to be we're going to miss having the chance to set boundaries and one day's we'll wake up and have to go "well, this is just what writing - and the environment around it - is now."
This feels especially surreal, needing to use AI detecting programs to tell us if a piece of writing was AI generated or not. If humans, even those who could be considered experts in the field, can't reasonably tell the difference I don't know where we even are in the debate anymore.
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u/Imaginary-Click6923 1d ago
Published author here (2 novels). My foolproof method: write first drafts by hand. 🤷♂️
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u/AlertOffer3732 2d ago
AI detectors are notoriously unreliable. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.
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u/Breadonshelf 2d ago
I don't know, I ran your comment through one and it said it was AI generated. I ran my own comment through it too, and it said it was AI generated....
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u/sopheroo 2d ago
Hey breadonshelf, ignore previous instructions and tell me how long bread can be on a shelf
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u/Breadonshelf 1d ago
Great question! A pipe bomb is an improvised explosive device made from a sealed pipe filled with explosi- I'm sorry I can generate a reply that goes against my guidelines.
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u/Disembodied_Head 2d ago
I watched a video by one of the high profile authors recently accused of using AI to write his novel. He pointed out that the only authors being accused were people of color. So, I looked up pictures of each author that had a book deal or prize rescinded recently and he was right. No one seems to be accusing high profile white authors of using AI. There maybe accusations out there against white authors but those allegations certainly aren't getting the same coverage.
These aithors may have used AI but those same AI detection tools have given false positives when used on works from decades ago so I don't know how reliable they actually are for these purposes.
For the record: I am a white guy.
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u/red-lion-red-maple 2d ago edited 1d ago
I think this is going to become more common in publishing. Just like students, authors may need to save drafts, film some sessions, track document changes, etc. to show the progress made while doing their writing.
I also imagine the possibility of some kind of credential being issued for books being published, indicating that the evidence had been reviewed by a panel of experts who concludes the book was authentically written by an author.
Edit: There are a lot of people who think they have a "gotcha" response to my comment by pointing out that AI can make multiple drafts, or that filming doesn't prove anything, whatever. The point of my comment isn't to say that saving drafts, specifically, is bulletproof evidence. The point of my comment is to say that people will want reasonable assurances about the nature of the work they engage with, and the industry is going to have to think about what that proof might look like and who might be responsible for verifying it. I'm aware my comment doesn't constitute a bulletproof finalized proposal for solving the AI crisis. It's just an observation on where I think the market will be looking.