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Montreal publishing house Éditions du Boréal announced Wednesday it is ending its professional relationship with Thélyson Orélien — a Haitian-born, Quebec-based author.
In a news release, the publisher said new information, confirmed over the course of recent days, indicates that artificial intelligence was used in the writing process of Orélien’s novel, C’était ça ou mourir, published earlier this year.
The news comes after Orélien’s repeated assurances to Éditions du Boréal that he had not used such technology to create his novel.
“Consequently, Boréal will not reprint the novel, nor will it publish any further books by Thélyson Orélien,” the release reads.
C’était ça ou mourir, which translates to “It was either that or die,” tells the story of a Haitian migrant who leaves his home for Canada, much like Orélien did following the 2010 earthquake.
Following its publication in the spring, the novel was lauded by many in the French-language literary world, until an anonymous X account ran excerpts through an AI detection tool and publicly shared those screengrabs on Sept. 21 — the same day the novel won the Prix du roman Fnac.
According to the tool Pangram, the novel was “100 per cent” the work of generative AI.
In a statement last week, Orélien said the accusations were “slander and heresy,” and that while he did use AI tools “here and there” for research, he says the text, structure and plot all come “straight from my gut.”
In the same statement, he also admitted to separate allegations of plagiarism, but said they were “unacceptable” mistakes from his youth.
The publishing house says that over the past few weeks, it worked with Orélien to compile a record documenting his creative process, with the aim of demonstrating that the AI claims were baseless.
“However, these efforts failed to resolve the question of whether AI was used in his novel,” the release reads.
It goes on to state that the author subsequently announced he would not provide any further information on the book’s writing process.
Boréal says that, while its role is not to investigate its authors, the situation required it take further action. That’s why it commissioned an external analysis of all working versions of the novel.
“The results, received this week, revealed traces of AI markers in the metadata of certain documents,” the publisher wrote.
And while it says it doesn’t know to what extent AI was used in the creation of C’était ça ou mourir — and may never know — what it came down to was the issue of trust between author and publisher.
Boréal says it communicated its decision to Orélien before making it public.
It urged people to exercise restraint to bring an end to the personal attacks against Orélien.
“As we have stated from the outset, beyond the book and the controversy, there is, first and foremost, a human being.”