29/10/2026

LYFE THURSDAY | OCT 29, 2026

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Publisher drops writer who used AI o Thelyson Orelien had previously denied allegations regarding novel’s authenticity T HE publisher of top-selling Haitian-Canadian writer Thelyson Orelien said recently it had confirmed It said it gathered all the working versions of the novel and hired an outside party to analyse the various drafts.

“The results obtained this week revealed traces of AI tags in the metadata of certain documents,” Boreal said. Before conducting this analysis, the publisher said it had tried to work with Orelien to gather the evidence necessary to prove his innocence. That effort was inconclusive and Orelien “subsequently announced that he would not provide any further information,” the publisher said. The novel about migration, known by its original French title C’etait ca ou mourir , had been scheduled for translation in more than 20 countries. ‘Slander and heresy’ The book was shrouded in suspicion and withdrawn from the shortlist for France’s top book prize, the Goncourt, after tests with AI detector

that he used artificial intelligence (AI) to help write his novel It Was Either That or Die. Orelien has denied allegations that he used AI on his breakthrough novel and up till recently, Canadian publisher Boreal said it was standing by the 38-year-old writer. But now, Boreal said it had conducted a further investigation into the allegations. “New information, confirmed over the past few days, indicates that AI was used in the writing process” of the novel, a Boreal statement said. The publisher announced it was “ending its professional relationship” with Orelien. Boreal said it did not know the extent of AI’s use in the writing process “and we will likely never have a definitive answer.”

Orelien says he only used AI for ‘historical research’. – AFPPIC

so far this year. The South African now heads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method and is preparing to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm. As for her own production, she mentions her use of AI only when required by a sales platform. “For the last 16 years, nobody’s asked me what my creative process was,” said Hart, who publishes under more than 10 other pen names. Now, she was ready to make it public “for the right reasons”. Regularly accused of contributing to “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content in text, video, music or images – Hart points to the ultimate yardstick: “Books are selling.” “Readers don’t read rubbish books – they return them,” she said. The writer has followed the debate around a novel by Haitian-Canadian Thelyson Orelien that was withdrawn from the shortlist for France’s Goncourt prize after accusations that he used AI, which his publisher confirmed recently. Critics had praised the book and sales were strong before the controversy, she said, asking: “If you need an AI label to hate something, do you hate it or do you hate AI?” struck the Caribbean island, already ravaged by poverty and unrest. In response to separate allegations of plagiarism, Orelien admitted to making “unacceptable mistakes” in the past in his writing, without mentioning specifics. “I was just over 20, I was probably a little too impatient, without really understanding how much I still had to learn. I wanted to write, I was reading a lot. “But admiring someone does not give you the right to take, to claim as mine texts that are not my own,” he wrote.

used AI “in the creative process” for “historical research”. “I’ve explained everything to those close to me, but at the moment I don’t think my words count for anything,” he said, adding that what he is currently experiencing has “gone way too far”. Orelien said he started writing the book in late 2017 “on the corner of a table” and completed a first draft in 2019 of more than 300 pages, several years before the advent of AI services such as ChatGPT.

Pangram 100% probability it contained computer generated text. In a statement made earlier this month, Orelien called the allegations “slander and heresy”. He said in the statement sent exclusively to AFP: “Here and there I did use tools for research, particularly for foreign idioms. “But not a single sentence in this book was created by a machine, nor the meaning or the structure of a story that comes from my gut.” indicated a

C’etait ca ou mourir has been embroiled in controversy over its authenticity. – REUTERSPIC 370 books in 20 months: S. African author defends using ChatGPT, Claude He stood firm recently, telling the French newspaper Liberation he The author fled his native Haiti following a 2010 earthquake that

SOUTH African writer Coral Hart has published more than 370 books since February 2025 using artificial intelligence (AI), a process she passionately defends despite criticism and threats. “Grifter”, “villain” – insults abound on social media to describe the author who, in her 40s, has become the symbol of AI’s arrival in publishing. Coral Hart – a pseudonym she uses to protect her real name – told AFP in an interview she had received “tens of thousands” of hate messages and several death threats. In this hostile environment, few authors using AI agree to speak publicly and show their faces. “I chose to be the one to step up and say, these are conversations we need to start having. “This is here... They’re not going to switch it off or unplug it because a bunch of authors said so,” Hart said. Before she started writing with AI around 20 months ago, Hart had been working in publishing for 14 years and written several dozen works without the technology. It took her three months to familiarise herself with the various AI models and build a framework capable of producing a book. Now, she juggles between

ChatGPT, which is “really good at dialogue, terrible at prose”; Claude, “really good story structure, terrible at sex drives” and others such as Grok, “completely unhinged”, but good on “spicy scenes”. “If you say, ChatGPT, write me a book, or, Claude, write me a book, you’re going to get a flaming dumpster fire of trash back because it doesn’t have anything (to work with),” Hart said. The author defines the story concept, a style, details of the characters and chapter outlines. And only then will her system generate the books. Hart said when she started, “we could write one paragraph at a time. I usually took two or three prompts to do that.” “I can now draft the whole book in one sequence.” Since last year, AI models have “improved vastly”. “The prose has improved. The syntax has improved. The sentence structure has improved,” Hart said. ‘Books are selling’ The first draft of a book is generally not good, the writer said. It is run through AI for “developmental edits” and then again,

Hart poses for a portrait at the Cape Town public library. – AFPPIC

Although one of her novels made it into Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers, the vast majority of her 371 titles – many of them romance – are tailored to certain readers based on rigorous market research. She has sold more than one million books, by her own estimate, in digital, print and audio formats, earning more than US$1 million (RM4 million)

“to fix any continuity issues, story issues, flat middles, character arcs that are incomplete, plot threads that have been dropped, people whose eye colour has changed.” At the end of this process, a human proofreader reads through the text to fix any “AI tells that have slipped through” and do some rewriting. “And it’s usually ready to go.”