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.
The accusations against Mr. Orélien last month turned into a literary scandal that rocked France and prompted deep soul-searching among the country’s writers and publishers about what the emergence of A.I. means for the future of literature.
It also led the jury of the Goncourt prize, France’s most prestigious literary award, to remove “It Was Either That or Die” from this year’s shortlist for the prize.
The furor erupted after a little-known social media account said it had run the book through an A.I.-detector tool called Pangram, which concluded it was written with the help of A.I. It was later revealed that the anonymous social media account was partly run by Samuel Fitoussi, a columnist at Le Figaro, a conservative daily newspaper.
In the immediate aftermath of those accusations, Mr. Orélien swiftly denied ever using A.I. to write his novel. But as the scandal grew bigger and accusations of plagiarism in his earlier writing surfaced, he refrained from commenting further on any of the accusations and put an abrupt end to his literary tour in France.
“Silence comes at a price: by staying silent, I was letting others tell my story for me,” the 38-year-old writer said on Tuesday, in a statement provided by his French publisher, railing against “experts” who “came after” his novel.
The author grew up in a middle-class family in Haiti and left for Canada after the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and destroyed his home. His novel, which depicts a migrant’s harrowing journey from Haiti to Canada, “comes from my own wounds and those of other migrants,” he said on Tuesday.
He started writing it in 2017, he said, and finished the first 300-page draft in 2019, years before A.I. tools were widely available. A.I. did not create “the meaning or structure of a narrative that comes from my gut,” he wrote on Tuesday.
He did, however, acknowledge plagiarism in earlier writing.
Radio Canada, Canada’s national public broadcaster, reported last month that Mr. Orélien had plagiarized four opinion articles published in 2012 and 2013 and that chunks of an award-winning 2012 short story, “Où va le monde,” resembled parts of a French book published in 1960, “Le Matin des Magiciens.”
On Tuesday Mr. Orélien listed a series of writers he said he admired at the time, including the authors of “Le Matin des Magiciens.”
“But admiration does not give me the right to take, to claim as my own, texts that are not mine,” he said.
“I made unacceptable mistakes, despite my youth and inexperience. I deeply regret this and present my apologies without reserve,” he added.
Mr. Orélien said that, though criticism was always legitimate, the “threats,” “media lynching” and “racist harassment” to which he had been subjected over the past few weeks had been “unbearable.”
He concluded by calling for his novel to be judged “for what it is.”
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