Canadian publisher Boréal announced on Wednesday that it has ended its professional relationship with Haitian-Canadian author Thelyson Orelien after an outside review found signs that artificial intelligence was used in the writing of his novel, "It Was Either That or Die." The decision reverses the publisher's earlier position of support for the 38-year-old writer, who had denied the allegations. The news was reported by Al Jazeera and the AFP news agency.
According to Al Jazeera, Boréal said it commissioned a fresh investigation after accusations first appeared in September. In a statement, the publisher said recently confirmed information showed that AI played a part in producing the book. Boréal added that it cannot say how much of the novel was machine-assisted and that a definitive answer will probably never be established.
Why it matters
The case lands at a sensitive moment for publishing, where editors, prize juries and readers are still working out how to handle books that may have been produced with generative AI tools. Orelien's novel, published in French as "C'etait ca ou mourir," had been a breakout success and was set to be translated in more than 20 countries, according to Al Jazeera. Its removal from consideration for France's top literary award, the Goncourt, and now the loss of its publisher, show how quickly a promising literary career can be disrupted by questions about authorship.
The dispute also raises a practical problem that publishers have yet to solve: proving or disproving AI use is difficult, and the tools available for detection are contested. Boréal's own statement acknowledges that the full picture may never be known.
How the review was carried out
Al Jazeera reports that Boréal collected every working version of the novel it could obtain and brought in an independent party to examine the drafts. The publisher said the analysis, completed this week, turned up traces of AI tags in the metadata of some of the documents.
Before reaching that conclusion, Boréal said it had tried to work with Orelien to assemble evidence that would clear him. That effort did not settle the question, and according to the publisher, the author later said he would not supply any further material.
The review followed a September report that the Goncourt had dropped the book from its shortlist. Al Jazeera reports that testing with an AI detection tool called Pangram indicated a 100 percent probability that the text contained computer-generated writing.
The author's position
Orelien has rejected the accusations throughout. In a statement sent to AFP earlier this month, he described the claims as "slander and heresy," and said that while he had used tools for research, particularly to check foreign idioms, no sentence, meaning or story structure in the book came from a machine. He said the narrative came from his own instincts.
On Wednesday, Al Jazeera reports, he maintained that position in comments to the French newspaper Liberation, saying he had used AI during the creative process for historical research. He also said he started writing the novel in late 2017, before services such as ChatGPT became widely available. When the allegations first emerged in September, Orelien said he believed racism was behind the attacks on him.
Boréal's statement did not address those claims directly. The publisher framed its decision around the documentary evidence it had gathered rather than around the author's account of how the book was written.
What the metadata finding means
The publisher's conclusion rests on markers embedded in the files of early drafts rather than on a judgment about the finished text. Metadata can record the software used to create or edit a document, though such traces are not by themselves proof of how much a tool contributed to the writing. Boréal itself was careful to say the extent of AI involvement remains unclear.
That gap between what the files show and what actually happened in the writing process is likely to keep the dispute alive. Supporters of Orelien can point to the absence of a definitive finding, while the publisher can point to traces it says should not be there if the book was written entirely by hand.
For now, the immediate consequence is concrete: a publisher that had stood behind its author last week has withdrawn, and a novel that was headed for translation in more than 20 countries has lost its French-language house. Al Jazeera reports that Orelien has not indicated what he will do next, and Boréal has not said whether it will take any further steps regarding the book.
