Goncourt Prize winner explains how he used ChatGPT in his novel

Philippe Jaenada, who won the Goncourt Prize on Tuesday for his novel The Stranger from the Quai de Javel, told French radio station France Inter that he had turned to AI three times while working on the book. He added a sentence written by ChatGPT to “play with the reader,” included AI-generated text with absurd answers about a technical detail, and used AI to find information. The admission came the day after the prize was awarded. In September, the jury had removed another novel from its longlist after suspecting it had been created with AI.

Goncourt Prize winner explains how he used ChatGPT in his novel

How Jaenada used AI

Jaenada said he told the jury members which sentence in the novel had been written by ChatGPT. He said he did so on the day the prize was awarded and would be able to tell where the information leaked from.

The writer used a separate AI-generated passage to mock ChatGPT, which had given “completely absurd answers” to a question about a technical detail. He also used AI once to find information.

The 62-year-old Jaenada believes AI’s development cannot be stopped and that pretending it does not exist is not an option. In his view, the first step is to acknowledge that it exists, then learn to manage it and put it to useful use.

Before the prize was awarded, the writer had already spoken about using AI. In an interview with 20 Minutes, he compared it to a film director being open about using special effects, and suggested that soon it would be impossible to claim a text was 100% written by a human. At the same time, Jaenada believes AI will never be able to write a book with an author’s heart, soul and memories.

The novel removed from the longlist

In September, the Goncourt Academy removed This or Death, by Canadian-Haitian writer Télison Orélien, from its longlist. His debut was one of the notable successes of the French book season—a period from late August to early November when many books are published in France. The novel sold more than 35,000 copies and won the Fnac Novel Prize.

Journalist Samuel Fitoussi then checked the book using Pangram, an AI-text detection program, and concluded that a substantial part of it may have been generated by a machine. The reliability of such programs has been called into question.

In a statement on September 25, the Goncourt Academy said that, based on analyses by researchers and journalists, the novel was “highly likely to have been largely created by artificial intelligence.” The academy said it wanted to protect the reputation of a prize established to recognize “literature written by women and men,” and to make clear that it did not support texts created with AI.

In an October statement, Orélien called the accusations “slander and heresy” and said that not a single sentence in the book had been created by a machine. In the same statement, he admitted to plagiarism in earlier works and apologized for passing off other people’s writing as his own. The following week, his Canadian publisher Boréal said new evidence confirmed that AI had been used in the book, contrary to the author’s repeated assurances, and ended its relationship with him.

Reaction to the different treatment of the authors

The contrast between the two cases prompted online accusations of racial double standards. One X user wrote that an older white man gets away with using AI, while a young writer of color is “stoned in the town square.” Another said Jaenada had escaped “media persecution and exile”—an indulgence they said had not been extended to Orélien.

Jaenada won the prize in the first round of voting, with six jury members voting for him and three for Sylvain Prudhomme and his novel Beyond the Lake. Jaenada had previously made the shortlist four times. He specializes in reinvestigating old French crimes.

In the winning novel, the writer reconstructs the story of the unsolved murder of Louise Cance, a 29-year-old Breton artists’ model. In Montparnasse, she was known as “the woman in a hundred portraits.”

The Goncourt Prize comes with a symbolic check for just €10, but remains France’s best-known and most closely watched literary award. The Goncourt Academy, led by novelist Philippe Claudel, was asked to comment on the situation.

Dataist's take: The two cases show that literary institutions have yet to draw a consistent, verifiable line between acceptable uses of AI and text created with its help. In Orélien’s case, the academy’s conclusion relied on analyses by researchers and journalists, while the reliability of AI-detection programs remains disputed.