Prix Goncourt Winner Philippe Jaenada Says He Used AI Three Times in His Novel

Jaenada, 62, won France's best-known literary award for L'Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel). On Wednesday he told France Inter radio that he had used AI in three ways. He included one sentence written by ChatGPT as a game with the reader, and said he had told only the Goncourt jurors, on the day of the award, which sentence it was. He also included a passage of AI-generated text to mock ChatGPT for giving absurd answers about a technical detail, and he used the tool for research.

The case shows how quickly publishers and prize juries are being forced to decide what counts as acceptable AI use in creative work, and how inconsistent those decisions can look. "I don't think AI can be held back. We can't pretend it doesn't exist," Jaenada said, according to The Guardian. He said writers have to acknowledge using it and "tame it".

In September the academy removed Thélyson Orélien's C'était ça ou Mourir (It Was That or Die) from its longlist. The debut by the Canadian-Haitian writer 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 that much of it had been machine-generated. The reliability of such detectors has been questioned. In a statement on September 25, the academy said analyses by researchers and journalists showed the novel was "in all likelihood very largely the product of an artificial intelligence". It said the prize exists to honour literature written by people.

Orélien denied the allegations in October, saying no sentence in the book had been created by a machine. In the same statement he admitted plagiarism in earlier work. The following week his Canadian publisher, Boréal, said new evidence showed AI had been used in writing the novel, contrary to his assurances, and ended its relationship with him.

The different treatment of the two authors has drawn accusations of a racial double standard on social media, with users contrasting the response to an older white author with the treatment of a young writer of colour. Jaenada had spoken openly about using AI before the award. In an interview with 20 Minutes he compared it to a film director using special effects, while saying AI could never write a book with "its heart, its soul, its memories".

The distinction the jury appears to draw is between a book largely generated by software and an author who used a chatbot for a few disclosed passages and research. The academy has not set out a written rule. Jaenada won on the first round of voting, by six votes to three over Sylvain Prudhomme's De l'autre côté du lac. His book reconstructs the unsolved 1949 murder of Louise Cansot, an artists' model in Montparnasse.

The Académie Goncourt, presided over by the novelist Philippe Claudel, has not yet commented on Jaenada's remarks. The prize carries only a symbolic €10 cheque, but it usually brings a large rise in sales.