Publisher admits AI was used to write Thélyson Orélien novel

Les Éditions du Boréal announced in a press release on Wednesday that Thélyson Orélien used artificial intelligence to write his novel 'C'était ça ou mourir'. The Canadian publisher will not reprint the book and will publish nothing further by him — a reversal from a week earlier, when it said it was backing the author and had no evidence establishing with certainty that AI had been used.

The accusations did not come from within the industry. They came from an X account, 'Balance ton Claude', which claimed to have identified extensive AI use in the novel. Orélien, a Quebec author, had assured his publisher on several occasions that no AI was involved. When he announced he would provide no further material, Boréal commissioned an in-depth external analysis of all working versions of the manuscript — the first independent examination the text is known to have received. The publisher now says it does not know to what extent AI was used, and probably never will.

Boréal calls the fundamental issue "the relationship of trust between authors and publishers". Trust is what the industry ran on, because a manuscript's provenance was guaranteed by the person who delivered it. While the book was on its list, the author's word sufficed. Once the accusations went public, the publisher defended him — its catalogue and reputation were tied to the novel — then commissioned an analysis, then dropped him. Verification entered the process only after the damage.

The affair has shaken French-language publishing for weeks and raised questions about the future of the writing profession. Those questions reach the prize system, which awards money and prestige for manuscripts whose human authorship no jury is asked to verify. A literary prize certifies human achievement; where authorship cannot be certified, the certificate attests to nothing. Publishers and prize committees are paid to know what they are publishing. In this case the detection was performed, free of charge and before any of them moved, by an anonymous account on X.

Boréal says it will probably never know how much of the novel a machine wrote. It did not need to know that to publish it.