Philippe Jaenada told French radio that he used ChatGPT to ‘play with the reader’, after the prize removed a different book from its longlist over allegations of AI use
The winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize has admitted using artificial intelligence while writing his novel, barely a day after collecting an award whose jury had thrown out another book over suspected AI use.
Philippe Jaenada, who won the Prix Goncourt on Tuesday for L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel), told France Inter radio on Wednesday that he had turned to AI “three times” while writing it.
The first, he said, was to slip in a sentence written by ChatGPT in order to “play with the reader”. He said he had revealed which sentence it was only to the Goncourt jurors, on the day of the award. “If it gets out, I’ll know where it came from,” he said.
He also included a section of AI-generated text to poke fun at ChatGPT, which gave “completely absurd answers about a technical detail”, and for research.
“I don’t think AI can be held back. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist,” said Jaenada, 62. “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.”
The admission comes after the Académie Goncourt removed Thélyson Orélien’s book C’était ça ou Mourir (It Was That or Die) from its longlist in September. The Canadian-Haitian writer’s debut had been the breakout hit of France’s rentrée littéraire – the period between late August and early November which sees many books published in France – selling more than 35,000 copies and winning the Prix du roman Fnac (Fnac novel prize), before the journalist Samuel Fitoussi ran it through the AI-detection tool Pangram and concluded that much of it had been machine-generated. However, the accuracy of AI-detection software has been called into question.
In a statement on 25 September, 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 it wanted to protect the integrity of a prize that exists to honour “literature written by women and men”, and to send “a clear message” that it did not endorse texts generated with the help of AI.
In an October statement, Orélien described the allegations as “slander and heresy”, adding that “not a single sentence in this book was created by a machine”. In the same statement, he admitted plagiarism in earlier work, apologising for claiming “as my own texts that are not mine”. The following week his Canadian publisher, Boréal, said new evidence showed AI had been used in the writing process, contrary to the author’s repeated assurances, and ended its relationship with him.
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 that it would soon be impossible to say a text was 100% human-written. But he insisted AI “will never be able to write a book with its heart, its soul, its memories”.
The contrast has prompted some 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. Another said Jaenada had faced “no media lynching, no banishment” over his use of AI – “a leniency denied to Thélyson Orélien”.
Jaenada won on the first round of voting, by six votes to three over Sylvain Prudhomme’s De l’autre côté du lac (The Other Side of the Lake). Shortlisted four times before, Jaenada has made a speciality of reinvestigating old French crimes. His winning book reconstructs the unsolved 1949 murder of Louise Cansot, a 29-year-old Breton artists’ model known in Montparnasse as “the woman with 100 portraits”.
The prize itself comes with only a symbolic €10 cheque, but it is France’s best known and most closely watched literary award.
The Académie Goncourt, presided over by the novelist Philippe Claudel, has been approached for comment.
