The admission, one day after the prize
The writer Philippe Jaenada, winner of the Prix Goncourt with L'Inconnue du quai de Javel, told France Inter radio that he had used artificial intelligence 'three times' while writing the novel, as reported by The Guardian. The admission came on Wednesday, just one day after the award of France's most prestigious literary honor, which took place on Tuesday. The prize consists of a symbolic €10 cheque but is among the most closely followed in France.
According to his account, the first use was the insertion of a sentence written by ChatGPT to 'play with the reader.' Jaenada said he revealed which sentence it was only to the Goncourt jurors on the day of the award, adding: 'If it comes out, I'll know where it came from.' He also included a section of AI-generated text to mock the 'completely absurd' answers ChatGPT gave about a technical detail, and cited AI as a research tool.
The author's position on AI
Jaenada, 62, argued that AI cannot be stopped: 'We cannot pretend it does not exist. We have to use it, but first recognize it and above all tame it. It must be useful.' Before the award, in an interview with 20 Minutes, he had defended the use of AI by comparing it to special effects in cinema and predicting that soon it will be impossible to claim that a text was 100% written by a human being; he insisted, however, that AI 'will never be able to write a book with heart, soul, memories.'
Jaenada won in the first round by six votes to three, beating Sylvain Prudhomme, a finalist with De l'autre côté du lac. He had already been a finalist four times, and his novel reconstructs the unsolved 1949 murder of Louise Cansot, a 29-year-old Breton model known in Montparnasse as 'the woman with a hundred portraits.'
The Orélien case and accusations of double standards
The admission rekindles the comparison with the case of Thélyson Orélien, whose novel C'était ça ou Mourir had been removed from the Académie Goncourt longlist in September. The work by the Canadian-Haitian writer, a breakout debut of the literary season with over 35,000 copies sold and the Prix du roman Fnac, had been analyzed with the AI-detection tool Pangram by journalist Samuel Fitoussi, who concluded that much of the text was machine-generated; the reliability of such software has, however, been questioned. In a statement on September 25, the academy said the analyses indicated the novel was 'in all likelihood very largely the product of artificial intelligence,' asserting the protection of the integrity of a prize dedicated to 'literature written by women and men.'
Orélien had rejected the accusations, calling them 'slander and heresy' and assuring that 'not even a single sentence' in the book had been created by a machine; in the same statement he admitted plagiarism in previous works. The following week, Canadian publisher Boréal announced new evidence of AI use, contradicting the author's reassurances, and ended the relationship. Accusations of racial double standards circulated online: one user wrote that it was acceptable for 'an old white man' while 'a young writer of color is stoned in the public square,' and another spoke of 'no media lynching, no ban' for Jaenada, 'a leniency denied to Thélyson Orélien.'
What remains to be verified
The material does not clarify the criteria by which the Goncourt jurors assessed Jaenada's declared use, nor whether the academy changed its position after the Orélien case: The Guardian reports that the Académie Goncourt, chaired by novelist Philippe Claudel, was contacted for comment and does not report a response. The question therefore remains open as to the consistency of the criteria applied to the two authors, which the text documents as public perception but not as a formal decision by the body.
