Goncourt Winner Philippe Jaenada Says He Used AI, Including a Hidden ChatGPT Sentence

Jaenada, 62, won France's best-known literary prize on Tuesday, November 3, for L'Inconnue du quai de Javel. The 528-page book, published by Flammarion, investigates the unsolved murder of a young woman found dead on a quay of the Seine in Paris. Radio-Canada reported that Jaenada described his use of AI the next day in an interview with the French radio station France Inter.

The disclosure matters because AI had already disrupted this year's prize season. In September the Goncourt jury removed Thélyson Orélien's novel C'était ça ou mourir, once seen as a contender, from its second selection over suspected heavy use of AI. Plagiarism accusations followed. His Montreal publisher, Boréal, ended its work with him after traces of AI were reportedly found in the metadata of some documents. Orélien has told the French newspaper Libération that he wrote the novel himself, though he admits using AI for historical research. Within a few weeks, generative AI has now been publicly tied to both the season's most controversial book and its winner.

Jaenada described the first use as a game with his readers. He said he put in one sentence produced by ChatGPT to "jouer avec le lecteur", or play with the reader, and that he had told only the Goncourt jurors which sentence it was. He joked that if the secret ever got out, he would know where the leak came from.

The second use, he said, was to mock the chatbot, which gave absurd answers about a technical detail. The third was technical research.

Jaenada presented his position as practical rather than enthusiastic. "On ne peut pas faire comme si ça n'existait pas," he said, meaning that writers cannot pretend AI does not exist. According to Radio-Canada, he said the technology has to be acknowledged and tamed so that it stays useful and does not replace writers.

The two cases differ in disclosure and scale. Jaenada describes one generated sentence, used knowingly as a literary device, plus help with research, and he has made all of it public himself. The allegations against Orélien concerned extensive, undisclosed use, which he disputes. Neither the Radio-Canada nor the Euronews report includes a response from the Académie Goncourt to Jaenada's remarks.

The Goncourt itself pays a symbolic cheque of €10, according to Euronews. This year's prize has also drawn criticism because all four finalists were published by imprints of the Madrigall group, which owns Flammarion and Gallimard. Jaenada has not said publicly which sentence in the novel came from ChatGPT.