Boréal cuts ties with Telson Orelien after AI review

What the review found

Last week, Les Éditions du Boréal said it stood by the 38-year-old author. On Wednesday, it announced a new review of the allegations, saying information confirmed over the preceding days pointed to AI use in writing the novel.

Boréal gathered the book’s working drafts and hired an independent specialist to examine them. The analysis found traces of AI markers in the metadata of some documents. The publisher said it does not know how broadly AI was used and may never get a conclusive answer.

Before the analysis, Boréal tried to work with Orelien to assemble material that could establish his innocence. That effort did not succeed. Orelien later said he would provide no more information, and the publisher ended its professional relationship with him.

Pangram, a detection service, had assessed the book as having a 100% probability of containing machine-generated text. Following that assessment, the novel was removed from the Goncourt shortlist. It had been planned for translation in more than 20 countries.

Orelien’s account

Earlier this month, Orelien called the allegations “defamation” and “heresy” in a statement to Agence France-Presse. He acknowledged using research tools, including to understand foreign expressions, but said no machine had created a sentence, the meaning, or the structure of the story.

On Wednesday, he told the French newspaper Libération that he had used AI in the creative process for historical research. He said he had explained everything to people close to him, but no longer thought his words mattered; in his view, the situation had gone too far.

Orelien says he began the book in late 2017, “at the corner of a table.” He completed a first draft of more than 300 pages in 2019, several years before services such as ChatGPT appeared.

A dispute with no clean resolution

The publisher’s review establishes a narrow finding: traces of AI markers appeared in metadata. It does not establish how much AI contributed to the novel, and Boréal itself says that question may now be impossible to answer. I think that gap matters more than the detection score: the consequences are clear, while the extent of the alleged use is not.

Orelien left Haiti after the 2010 earthquake struck the Caribbean island, which was already facing poverty and instability. Separately, responding to plagiarism allegations, he acknowledged making “unacceptable mistakes” in earlier writing without specifying the cases. He said he was just over 20, in a hurry, and did not yet understand how much he had to learn. Admiring another writer, he added, does not give anyone the right to claim their work.