Canadian publisher Boreal has ended its professional relationship with best-selling Haitian-Canadian writer Thelyson Orelien after confirming that he used artificial intelligence to help write his novel “It Was Either That or Die.” The decision was announced on Wednesday, following a further investigation the publisher carried out after allegations first surfaced in September.
In a statement, Boreal said new information gathered over the past few days showed that AI had been used in the writing process. Only last week, the company had said it stood by the 38-year-old author, who had previously denied the allegations.
Publisher’s inquiry into the novel’s drafts
Boreal said it could not establish how extensively AI was used and that it would “likely never have a definitive answer.” To investigate, the company collected all working versions of the manuscript and passed them to an external party for analysis.
The results, obtained this week, revealed traces of AI tags in the metadata of certain documents, according to the publisher. Boreal said it had also asked Orelien to help gather evidence that could prove his innocence, but that effort was inconclusive, and he later said he would share no further information.
Orelien’s denials and his explanation
Orelien earlier called the accusations “slander and heresy” in a statement sent to AFP this month. He acknowledged using tools for research, particularly for foreign idioms, but insisted that no sentence had been produced by a machine.
Speaking to the French newspaper Liberation on Wednesday, he maintained that he had used AI “in the creative process” for “historical research.” He also said he began writing the book in late 2017, before services such as ChatGPT were widely available, and that he believed racism lay behind the attacks when the allegations emerged.
Goncourt removal and planned translations abroad
The novel, which deals with migration, was known in French as “C’etait ca ou mourir” and had been scheduled for translation in more than 20 countries. France’s top book prize, the Goncourt, removed it from its shortlist after tests using the AI detector Pangram indicated a 100 percent probability that it contained computer-generated text.
