As The Guardian reported, the Goncourt Academy excluded the novel by Canadian-Haitian writer Telison Aurélien, “Either This or Death” (C’était ça ou mourir), from the list of contenders for the prestigious French literary prize. The academy said this is how it protects the reputation of the prize and the academy itself, and separately emphasized that it does not support or endorse texts created with the help of artificial intelligence.
The book by the Haiti-born writer is written in the first person: its protagonist is a history and geography teacher who flees a country mired in violence and embarks on a dangerous journey to Canada. The novel was first published in Canada and then in France, became one of the bestsellers of the new French literary season, and on September 21 received the Fnac prize.
On the same day, the anonymous account Balance ton Claude (“Expose Your Claude”) claimed that it had uploaded the text into a program for detecting AI content and received a result indicating that the book was “almost entirely” written by artificial intelligence. At the same time, as The Guardian noted, some French media outlets checked the novel with other detectors and concluded that “Either This or Death” was probably written by a human.
Aurélien rejected the accusations and said that this was about racial prejudice. In addition, he was accused of plagiarism: according to Libération and the Canadian La Presse, in another of Aurélien’s stories, “Where Is the World Going” (Où va le monde), a significant part of the text was almost verbatim borrowed from the preface to Louis Pauwels’s book Morning of the Magicians, published in 1960. French media write that it was these accusations that likely influenced the decision to remove the novel from the list of nominees.
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