Boréal drops Thélyson Orélien after finding AI tags in his drafts

Les Éditions du Boréal, the Montreal publisher of Thélyson Orélien, ended its collaboration with the Haitian-Canadian novelist on October 21. In a statement, it says new evidence shows that artificial intelligence was used in writing C'était ça ou mourir, his novel about street gangs, even though the author had repeatedly assured it he never used AI.

Two analyses, two kinds of evidence

The case against Orélien has been built twice, with very different methods.

September: reading the style

The first accusation came from an account on X that ran passages of the published novel through Pangram, an AI-text detector. Tools like this read the words on the page and estimate how likely they are to come from a language model, based on statistical patterns in word choice and sentence structure. They give a probability, not proof.

They also disagreed. Some detectors scored the passages as AI-written, others as human. An AFP check with the InVID-WeVerify tool judged them "very probably written by a human." That was enough for the Académie Goncourt to drop the book, but not enough for Boréal, which kept it in stores and said a publisher should not demand proof from its authors.

October: opening the files

The new analysis did not look at the prose at all. Boréal gathered every working version of the novel, the files the author wrote it in, and commissioned an outside analysis of them. It found "traces of AI tags in the metadata of some documents."

The French word Boréal used is balises: in technical terms, tags. Besides the text you see, a file such as a Word document carries hidden information called metadata: who created it, with which program, when it was edited. Some software, including AI writing tools, also writes its own labels into that metadata, or into the document's underlying markup, when it generates or changes content.

What the difference means

A detector's score is an opinion about style, and can be argued with. A tag in a source file is a record left by software: it shows that an AI tool touched the document, whatever the text sounds like. That is why Boréal now says AI "was used in the writing process," after weeks of saying it could neither confirm nor deny it.

But a tag is a trace of a tool, not a measure of how much of the text it wrote. Boréal says it does not know to what extent AI was used, and will likely never have a definitive answer. It will not reprint the novel or publish any other book by Orélien, saying trust has been broken, and asked the public to stop personal attacks against him.

How the affair unfolded

• September 21: an account on X accuses Orélien of writing the novel with AI, based on an AI-text detector.
• September 25: the Académie Goncourt removes the novel from its prize selection.
• October 13: Orélien admits to plagiarism while denying any use of AI. He told AFP that no sentence in the book was created by a machine, and that he used tools "here and there" for research, notably for foreign idioms.
• Mid-October: Boréal keeps the book in stores, saying a publisher should stand by its authors rather than demand proof. Orélien then stops gathering evidence of his process.
• October 21: Boréal announces the metadata findings and ends the relationship.

Orélien maintains that he used AI only for research. "It is very cruel over here, on the Quebec side," he told Libération.

The novel is published in France by Grasset, which had defended its author against claims the book was written by AI.