Canadian publisher Boréal ends ties with Thélyson Orélien after finding traces of AI in novel's metadata

On Wednesday, Les Éditions du Boréal, the Canadian publisher of Haitian Canadian novelist Thélyson Orélien, announced it was "ending its professional relationship" with the 38-year-old author. The reason: a further investigation, the publisher said, had turned up evidence that artificial intelligence was used in writing his novel C'était ça ou mourir (It Was Either That or Die).

The reversal came only a week after Boréal had said it was standing by him. Orélien had by then been removed from the list for the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, the month before. The trigger for that removal was a test with the AI detector Pangram, which indicated a 100% probability that the book contained computer-generated text. The novel, about migration, had been scheduled for translation in more than 20 countries.

Boréal described what it did next. It gathered all the working versions of the manuscript and hired an outside party to analyse various drafts. Before that, it said, it had tried to work with Orélien to assemble the evidence needed to prove his innocence. That effort was inconclusive, and according to the publisher, Orélien "subsequently announced that he would not provide any further information." The outside analysis then produced its finding: traces of AI tags in the metadata of certain documents. "New information, confirmed over the past few days, indicates that artificial intelligence was used in the writing process," Boréal's statement said.

The publisher was frank about the limits of what it knows. It said it does not know how extensively AI was used and that "we will likely never have a definitive answer."

Orélien has denied the allegations. In a statement sent exclusively to Agence France-Presse earlier this month, he called them "slander and heresy." He acknowledged that "here and there" he used tools for research, particularly for foreign idioms, but insisted that not a single sentence was created by a machine, nor the meaning or structure of the story, which he said comes from his gut.

He held that position on Wednesday, telling the French newspaper Libération that he used AI "in the creative process" for "historical research." He said he had explained everything to those close to him, but added: "at the moment I don't think my words count for anything." What he is now experiencing, he said, has "gone way too far."

Orélien also pointed to the book's timeline. He says he began writing it in late 2017 "on the corner of a table" and finished a first draft of more than 300 pages in 2019, several years before services such as ChatGPT arrived. He fled Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, which struck an island already ravaged by poverty and unrest.

Separately, he has faced allegations of plagiarism. In response, he admitted to making "unacceptable mistakes" in his past writing, without giving specifics. He wrote that he was just over 20, "probably a little too impatient," and was reading a lot. "But admiring someone does not give you the right to take, to claim as mine texts that are not my own," he said.

The case now rests on a gap: a publisher that says metadata shows AI involvement but cannot say how much, and an author who says he used AI only for research. Boréal's admission that a definitive answer may never come leaves publishers with a hard question about how authorship can be verified.