Boréal ends relationship with Thélyson Orélien over AI use

Les Éditions du Boréal said on Wednesday that it had ended its professional relationship with Thélyson Orélien after an outside review found AI tags in draft metadata for C’était ça ou mourir (It Was Either That or Die).

Agence France-Presse described the 38-year-old author as a top-selling Haitian Canadian writer. Boréal had said the previous week that it was standing by him. That position followed Orélien’s denial that AI helped write his breakthrough novel.

Boréal’s Wednesday statement said: “New information, confirmed over the past few days, indicates that artificial intelligence was used in the writing process.” The publisher announced that it was “ending its professional relationship” with Orélien.

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

Boréal said it gathered all working versions of the novel and hired an outside party to analyze drafts. “The results obtained this week revealed traces of AI tags in the metadata of certain documents,” the publisher said.

Before that analysis, Boréal said it had tried to work with Orélien to collect the evidence needed to prove his innocence. The effort was inconclusive. Orélien “subsequently announced that he would not provide any further information,” Boréal said.

In an exclusive statement to Agence France-Presse earlier this month, Orélien called the allegations “slander and heresy.” He acknowledged: “Here and there I did use tools for research, particularly for foreign idioms.”

In the same statement, Orélien rejected the central claim against him: “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.”

Orélien maintained a narrower admission on Wednesday in the French newspaper Libération. He said he used AI “in the creative process” for “historical research.” He added: “I’ve explained everything to those close to me, but at the moment I don’t think my words count for anything,” and said the matter had “gone way too far.”

Agence France-Presse reported that the novel concerns migration and had been scheduled for translation in more than 20 countries. Last month, it was withdrawn from the list for France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, after tests with AI detector Pangram indicated a 100% probability that it contained computer-generated text.

Those two findings do not settle the book’s provenance. Pangram supplied a probability score, while Boréal reported tags in certain documents. The publisher still could not determine the extent of AI’s use.

Orélien told Libération that he began writing in late 2017 “on the corner of a table.” He completed a first draft in 2019 of more than 300 pages, several years before AI services such as ChatGPT became available.

According to Agence France-Presse’s account, Orélien fled native Haiti after the 2010 earthquake that struck the Caribbean island, which the report described as already ravaged by poverty and unrest.

In response to separate plagiarism allegations, Orélien admitted to “unacceptable mistakes” in his writing without specifying them. He placed those errors in his early twenties: “I was just over 20, I was probably a little too impatient, without really understanding how much I still had to learn.”

Orélien continued: “I wanted to write, I was reading a lot.” On taking another author’s work, he said: “But admiring someone does not give you the right to take, to claim as mine texts that are not my own.”

What does the decision change for the novel?

For readers and prospective translators, Boréal’s decision severs its relationship with the author after the novel had been slated for translation in more than 20 countries. Boréal did not say whether those plans or a release schedule would continue. It also did not identify passages in which AI materially shaped the prose.

Publishers and translators now face a narrower but consequential question: how to document the boundary between an author’s research, drafting and machine assistance. Boréal’s investigation may never produce a definitive answer, leaving the migration novel’s planned international path unsettled.