Canadian publisher drops Thelyson Orelien, says he used AI to write novel

The publisher of top-selling Haitian-Canadian writer Thelyson Orelien said Wednesday it had confirmed that he used artificial intelligence to help write his novel It Was Either That or Die.

Orelien has denied allegations that he used AI on his breakthrough novel and, last week, Canadian publisher Boreal said it was standing by the 38-year-old writer.

But on Wednesday, Boreal said it had conducted a further investigation into the allegations.

“New information, confirmed over the past few days, indicates that artificial intelligence was used in the writing process” of the novel, a Boreal statement said.

The publisher announced it was “ending its professional relationship” with Orelien.

Boreal said it did not know the extent of AI’s use in the writing process “and we will likely never have a definitive answer”.

It said it gathered all the working versions of the novel and hired an outside party to analyse the various drafts.

“The results obtained this week revealed traces of AI tags in the metadata of certain documents,” Boreal said.

Before conducting this analysis, the publisher said it had tried to work with Orelien to gather the evidence necessary to prove his innocence.

That effort was inconclusive, and Orelien “subsequently announced that he would not provide any further information,” the publisher said.

The novel about migration, known by its original French title C’etait ca ou mourir, had been scheduled for translation in more than 20 countries.

The book was shrouded in suspicion and withdrawn from the shortlist for France’s top book prize, the Goncourt, after tests with AI detector Pangram indicated a 100 per cent probability it contained computer-generated text.

In a statement earlier this month, Orelien called the allegations “slander and heresy”.

“Here and there I did use tools for research, particularly for foreign idioms,” he said in a statement sent to Agence France-Presse.

“But not a single sentence in this book was created by a machine, nor the meaning or the structure of a story that comes from my gut.”

He stood firm on Wednesday, telling the French newspaper Liberation he used AI “in the creative process” for “historical research”.

“I’ve explained everything to those close to me, but at the moment I don’t think my words count for anything,” he said, adding that what he is currently experiencing has “gone way too far”.

Orelien said he started writing the book in late 2017 “on the corner of a table” and completed a first draft in 2019 of more than 300 pages, several years before the advent of AI services such as ChatGPT.

The author fled his native Haiti following a 2010 earthquake that struck the Caribbean island, already ravaged by poverty and unrest.

In response to separate allegations of plagiarism, Orelien admitted to making “unacceptable mistakes” in the past in his writing, without mentioning specifics.

“I was just over 20, I was probably a little too impatient, without really understanding how much I still had to learn. I wanted to write, I was reading a lot,” he wrote.

“But admiring someone does not give you the right to take, to claim as mine texts that are not my own.”