Detectors disagree over AI-use accusation against Thélyson Orélien’s prizewinning novel

Thélyson Orélien, a Haitian writer based in Quebec, was accused by an anonymous X account of using artificial intelligence to write C'était ça ou mourir, which won the Prix Fnac. The novel follows a history teacher’s flight from Port-au-Prince to Canada, has sold about 35,000 copies, received translation offers in roughly 20 languages and is competing for other French literary prizes. The accusations focus on stylistic patterns, including aphoristic sentences and “not X, but Y” constructions.

The account Balance ton Claude used the Pangram detector, which classified nearly all passages as AI-generated; other French tests produced scores between 95% and 100%. However, InVID-WeVerify judged the same excerpts “very probably human,” while seven other detectors returned mixed results. The article also notes that false-positive rates and detector scores alone cannot establish who authored a text.