Publisher Boreal said Wednesday it has severed its professional relationship with writer Thelyson Orelien after confirming that the Haitian-Canadian author used artificial intelligence (AI) to help write his novel "C'était ça ou mourir" (roughly, "That or Dying").
According to Boreal's statement, the publisher conducted an additional investigation after allegations surfaced in September, seeking to determine whether AI had been used to write the novel.
"New information, confirmed over the past few days, shows that artificial intelligence was used in the writing process" of the novel, Boreal's statement said.
Orelien had previously denied the allegations concerning his breakthrough novel, and last week the Canadian publisher had said it stood by the 38-year-old author.
Extent of AI use cannot be determined
Boreal said it does not know how extensively AI was used in the writing "and probably will never have a definitive answer."
According to Boreal, it collected all the manuscripts of the novel and hired an independent party to analyze the various drafts.
"The results obtained this week show traces of AI tags in the metadata of some documents," Boreal said.
The publisher also said it tried to work with Orelien to gather the evidence needed to prove his innocence, but the effort came to nothing, and Orelien subsequently "said he would provide no further information."
Author still insists no sentence was machine-written
Orelien's novel about migration, originally written in French under the title "C'était ça ou mourir," had been slated for translation in more than 20 countries.
France's most prestigious book prize, the Goncourt, removed the novel from its shortlist after checks with the AI detection tool Pangram found a 100 percent probability that the work contained computer-generated text.
However, in a statement sent to AFP earlier this month, Orelien called the allegations "defamation and heresy."
"Here and there I used tools for research, particularly for foreign idioms," he said. "But not a single sentence in this book was generated by a machine, nor does the meaning or structure of a story come from my intuition."
On Wednesday, Orelien maintained his position, telling the French newspaper Libération that he had used AI "during the creative process" for "historical research."
The author said he began writing the book in late 2017, before AI services such as ChatGPT became widespread.
When the allegations first emerged in September, Orelien said he suspected a racist element was behind the criticism directed at him.
