Goncourt winner Philippe Jaenada says he used ChatGPT three times in his novel

Jaenada, 62, won the prize on 3 November in the first round of voting, beating Sylvain Prudhomme's De l'autre côté du lac by six votes to three. Flammarion published the book.

Three uses, one hidden sentence

He said on France Inter that he had turned to AI three times. The first was a ChatGPT-written sentence slipped into the text to play with the reader. The second reproduced a ChatGPT exchange that gave absurd answers about a technical detail. He kept it in to mock the tool. The third was research. "I don't think AI can be held back. We can't pretend it doesn't exist," he said. "You have to use it, but first you have to acknowledge it, and above all you have to tame it. It has to be useful."

He said he had revealed which sentence was generated only to the Goncourt jurors, on the day of the award. "If it comes out, I know who it will come from," he joked on France Inter.

Pages 237 to 240 of the novel already describe his exchanges with ChatGPT and Claude. They include questions about a technical detail of his investigation, 20 Minutes pointed out.

Jaenada had defended using AI before the award. "Would a film director hide the fact that he uses special effects?" he asked in an interview with 20 Minutes, predicting it would soon be impossible to say a text was 100% human-written. He insisted AI "will never be able to write a book with its heart, its soul, its memories".

The book the jury threw out

The Académie Goncourt removed Thélyson Orélien's C'était ça ou mourir from its second selection on 25 September, Euronews reported; the Guardian described the same list as a longlist. The removal came 39 days before the academy gave Jaenada the prize. The Canadian-Haitian writer's debut had sold more than 35,000 copies and won the Prix du roman Fnac. Then the journalist Samuel Fitoussi ran it through the AI-detection tool Pangram and concluded much of it was machine-generated. The academy said analyses showed the novel was in all likelihood very largely the product of an artificial intelligence. It said it wanted to protect a prize that honours "literature written by women and men" and to send "a clear message" that it did not endorse texts generated with the help of AI. The accuracy of AI-detection software has itself been questioned.

Orélien denied it. He called the allegations slander and heresy. He said not a single sentence was created by a machine, while admitting plagiarism in earlier work.

His Canadian publisher Boréal then said new evidence showed AI had been used, contrary to the author's assurances. It ended its relationship with him. The book would not be reprinted.

A double standard, some readers say

The contrast prompted accusations of a racial double standard online. "So when it's an old white man it's fine, but when it's a young writer of colour he gets stoned in the public square?" one user wrote on X, the Guardian reported. Another said Jaenada had faced "no media lynching, no banishment" over his use of AI, "a leniency denied to Thélyson Orélien".

The cases are not identical. One involves limited, openly described experimentation; the other disputed claims of extensive machine authorship.

What the prize is worth

The Goncourt pays a symbolic €10 and the winning book has every chance of flying off the shelves before Christmas. The four finalists, unveiled on 27 October, were all published by houses in the Madrigall group, a dominance Euronews reported as a controversy over independence and bibliodiversity. Whatever the name of the winner, the group headed by Antoine Gallimard was sure to reap the commercial benefits, Euronews said. Last year's winner, Laurent Mauvignier's La maison vide, sold nearly 640,000 copies.

Jaenada's book runs to 528 pages. It reconstructs the unsolved murder of Louise Cansot, a 29-year-old artist's model found dead in Paris. He spent two years on it. About eighteen months went on gathering and organising historical material, he said in an interview published on 3 November.