The novel “C’était ça ou mourir” (“It Was Either That or Die”), by the Haitian Canadian writer Thélyson Orélien, was meant to be a standout of the French literary season. Instead, it became a fiasco that has unleashed some of the worst elements of French political hypocrisy and racism, all over questions that have exercised the publishing world in recent years: What to do about writers who use artificial intelligence? How much is too much? And can we even tell for sure?
But another story is emerging here: The five literary scandals around A.I. that I consider most significant this year have each focused on Black and brown writers.
Mr. Orélien’s novel, which recounts a young history and geography teacher’s flight from gang violence in Haiti, won France’s Prix du Roman Fnac and was longlisted for its most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt. Then an anonymous X account, Balance ton Claude (Denounce Your Claude), posted that the A.I.-detection software Pangram showed parts of the novel to be up to “100 percent” A.I.-generated. Accusations of plagiarism in Mr. Orélien’s earlier work followed.
Prominent writers such as Virginie Despentes, Dany Laferrière and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, came to Mr. Orélien’s defense, but the world of French letters closed ranks against him. His Canadian publisher, Éditions du Boréal, suspended promotion for the book. The Académie Goncourt removed the novel from its longlist in the interest, it said, of preserving “the integrity of the Goncourt prize and Academy, whose central role is to promote and award prizes to literature written by women and men.” The judgment was as swift, and as trenchant, as a guillotine.
So why the attention on this novel and this writer? It seems driven less by questions of technical (or technological) literary merit than by the workings of anti-woke vigilante activists claiming to defend the purity of literature.
None of this absolves an author of allegations of plagiarism (and I agree that A.I.-generated writing is a form of plagiarism that undermines the very value of literary creation). The accusations against Mr. Orélien are considerable and alarming. But they have been leveled by groups with clear political agendas.
The X account Balance ton Claude (which echoes France’s #MeToo equivalent, #BalanceTonPorc) had fewer than 100 followers when right-wing accounts began amplifying its accusations. The original post was later revealed to have been made by the Cambridge-educated conservative columnist Samuel Fitoussi, who reposted it to his own 34,500 followers. Asked why he first posted the accusation anonymously, he told Le Monde he wanted to “avoid framing this affair as a right-left divide.” Mr. Fitoussi is the author of “Woke Fiction,” where he decries what he sees as the “ideological transformation” of media, evidenced by, among other things, inclusive casting and prominent Black narratives.
This is a familiar playbook. Reporting in France and Canada has pointed to similarities between the denunciation of Mr. Orélien and other attacks on Black intellectuals, in particular the Cambridge sociologist Jason Arday, who was found dead at his home this past summer shortly after resigning amid reports and mounting evidence that he had plagiarized and fabricated parts of his life story. In Mr. Arday’s case, a “race science network” linked to the right-wing Cambridge professor James Orr and the conservative billionaire Peter Thiel used their connections to fuel the media campaign against him.
An A.I. case also rocked the Commonwealth Prize in May. After Jamir Nazir’s short story “The Serpent in the Grove” was named a regional winner, Pangram flagged the text as 100 percent A.I.-generated. Social media users ridiculed sentences such as “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” On the left, the debate turned to the standards used to assess so-called postcolonial literatures. “Incoherence that would disqualify a European writer is reframed as authenticity when it is attached to the right cultural geography,” Lina Abushouk wrote in an article that was published on the website “Africa Is a Country.” Yet after an in-depth analysis of the work that relied on interviews and time-stamped documents, the Commonwealth Foundation cleared Mr. Nazir and named his story the overall winner.
In March, Hachette Book Group canceled the U.S. release of “Shy Girl” by Mia Ballard and discontinued a British edition already on sale; in July, The Atlantic reported on unverified claims that H.M. Wolfe’s best seller “Daggermouth” was A.I.-generated (her publisher, Simon & Schuster, stood behind the novel); a few days later, Jerry Falade’s $2 million deal with Macmillan collapsed after his agents withdrew his novel amid A.I. concerns. Mr. Nazir is Trinidadian of East Indian descent, and Ms. Ballard, Ms. Wolfe and Mr. Falade are Black.
A.I.-generated fiction is swiftly becoming a widespread problem for literary publishing. But can we trust detection software like Pangram — which studies indicate has even greater limitations when it comes to languages other than English as well as nonstandard or nonnative varieties of English — to have the last word?
Without a forensic account of a book’s journey from manuscript to publication, we are unlikely to know for certain whether A.I. was used in the writing of any of these works. Mr. Orélien has said that a first draft of his novel was written in 2019, before A.I. tools were commercially available.
“C’était ça ou mourir” is not a novel I would have been eager to put on my own syllabus. Critics described it as lyrical, and Mr. Orélien has claimed there is a distinctive Caribbeanness to the text. And yet, I find it fairly linear and uncomplicated as far as Caribbean novels go, hardly innovative in the manner of René Depestre, the Haitian-French writer whose books Mr. Orélien’s narrator carries with him.
As someone who teaches literature for a living, I find the idea that an A.I. novel made it past the Fnac and Goncourt juries, as well as thousands of readers, deeply depressing. I can’t help but also find it depressing that our suspicions have been overwhelmingly focused on Black writers. Our default posture before a text should be that of a willing reader, not of a coroner performing an autopsy.
There is irony in watching the French literary establishment grapple so openly with authorship and authenticity. After all, it was Roland Barthes who declared the author “dead” in 1967 and the text a mere “fabric of quotations.” Oulipo, a group of experimental writers founded in 1960, generated texts using algorithms and other constraints. This kind of thing — write a 300-page novel without the letter “e,” which was the premise of Georges Perec’s “La Disparition” (“A Void”) — Claude could be good at.
When the news about Mr. Orélien broke, I hoped for a more devious (and delightful) scenario: an A.I.-generated novel smuggled into the running for France’s top literary prizes to lampoon a world that has long tokenized Caribbean and African writers or kept them at its periphery. “C’était ça ou mourir” is unfortunately a sadder and an older story.
France has always had a fraught relationship to its nonwhite authors. They are enlisted in progressive-sounding agendas — broadening representation, “decolonizing” curriculums — but rarely fully accepted by the establishment. They are often expected to explain their cultures of origin, to speak authentically and, above all, to conform to aesthetic and critical categories emanating from predominantly white institutions. The surveillance of Black writers is more than backlash against the literary world’s recent efforts to open its doors. It is a way for anti-woke activists to say the quiet part out loud: They would prefer that the literary world remain a fortress.
In French publishing, as elsewhere, Black writers remain strikingly rare. (Because French law restricts the collection of data on race, precise figures are hard to come by.) Those with the most to lose in these very public disgraces are young writers from underrepresented backgrounds whose work meets increased suspicion. They are being asked to choose between success and a target on their backs. Unmasking Black writers will cease to be a blood sport only when it fails to find so many spectators.
Doyle D. Calhoun is an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge and a 2026–27 Fellow of the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library.
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