As France Burns, Its Literary World Is Engulfed by Scandal
Did AI write the most celebrated French novel of the year?
Compared with riots and revolutions, literary controversies might seem like small beer, but for those who live through books, as I largely do, it is the riots and revolutions that are the epiphenomena. So while Paris burns, at least in part, I concern myself with the really important question, namely whether Thélyson Orélien’s novel, C’était ça ou mourir (It Was That or Die), was written wholly or in large part by artificial intelligence.
I am not fully, or even marginally, competent to answer this question. The book was put through the Pangram program, which supposedly detects writing by AI with a high degree of certainty, and which found that it was written wholly by AI. But AI itself says Pangram is not wholly reliable. Is AI itself reliable on this question? As Michel de Montaigne asked, Que sais-je? (“What do I know?”) though I think more accurately I would put it, “What do I know?”, which is a slightly different question.
An online French literary magazine asked me to review the book after the allegations were made, and as my review has yet to appear, I will not reveal my judgment on it here as a literary artifact. I will concern myself only with peripheral questions about the whole controversy.
Thélyson Orélien is a 38-year-old Haitian refugee now living in Montreal. He had published articles, poetry, and short stories before he published this novel, an account of the travails of a Haitian refugee who finally reaches Canada as a safe haven. The book was a sensation overnight, won some prizes, and was up for the Prix Goncourt, the premier literary prize in France that guarantees huge sales—though the book had already sold extremely well, in the tens of thousands. Then a journalist at Le Figaro called Samuel Fitoussi revealed, or perhaps I should say alleged, that it had been written by AI, which Orélien strenuously denied.
The controversy that followed strongly resembles that which followed the revelation that Jason Arday, the professor of the sociology of education at Cambridge, was a plagiarist and fantasist. As in the case of Arday, it was claimed by Orélien’s defenders that those who put his book to the test were motivated by racism, and that, as a corollary, their findings or allegations were worthless, and could and should be ignored.
This, of course, implies that the truth or otherwise of a statement is unimportant by comparison with the motivation of him who utters it. If Fitoussi was a racist, then what he said about the novel could and should be disregarded. Indeed, one leftist-leaning publication, Les Inrockuptibles, carried an article to the effect that the most important question was not whether Fitoussi’s allegations were well-founded or true, and said, among other things:
Suspicions and doubts [of the use of AI in their writing] weigh most heavily on authors and authoresses who are already in a minority in a publishing landscape that is in the majority white.
In other words, even if it were true that Orélien’s work was the product of AI, he should have been allowed to get away with it—just as Arday, according to some, should have been allowed to get away with his plagiarism, the low quality of his work, and his publicly-expressed fantasies. This carte blanche is what so-called racial justice both demands and amounts to. (To those with any historical imagination, the very term “racial justice” should send shivers down the spine.)
Here let me mention as an aside, a curious but revealing difference between the effect of militant feminism on the English and French languages. In English there is a demand that female forms of words such as actress be abandoned in favor of actor. In French, there is precisely the opposite demand, that traditionally masculine forms of words such as écrivain (writer) that have traditionally been used indiscriminately for female writers should be feminized to écrivaine. This suggests to me that the reform in usage has nothing to do with justice or bringing about equality but is simply an exercise of intimidatory power; the exercise of power is increasingly regarded as the highest good of human life and activity.
Now of course, if Fitoussi is mistaken, he owes Orélien an abject apology; if, to the contrary, Orélien posed as an author when he acted only as a stimulus to AI, and perhaps as a corrector of its work, he deserves opprobrium. But I am agnostic as to which is the case, and it is perfectly possible that we shall never know the truth beyond all dispute. The listing of the book for the possible award of the Prix Goncourt has in the meantime been abandoned, but that is no more than a precautionary measure and is not evidence one way or the other. I suppose it must be some consolation for Orélien that sales have held up.
The author has vehemently denied Fitoussi’s allegations, but his reliability as a witness in his own defense or as a man of probity has been rather undermined by the fact that he has been forced to acknowledge another discovery, that some of this earlier work was plagiarized. This he puts down as a regrettable youthful mistake, and it is true that he was only in his 20s when he plagiarized. Let him who was never foolish in his 20s cast the first stone.
In English law, in any case, the prosecution is not allowed to introduce evidence of previous convictions in support of a new accusation, on the grounds that to do so would be prejudicial. The fact that a man has been a burglar does not mean that he must have committed the burglary under present consideration, but the minds of the jury would be unfairly swayed in favor of the prosecution if it knew that this was precisely the kind of crime that the accused had committed in the past.
That a man has undoubtedly committed plagiarism in the past does not go to prove that he employed AI to “write” his book (or should it be, to write “his” book?). But we should not be human if, because he has admitted to plagiarism that was also detected by AI, we lent less credence to his protestations of innocence.
Unless the matter be resolved irrefutably one way or the other, most people will believe what they were already inclined to believe anyway, and ignorant armies will continue to clash by night.
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