Thelyson Orelien left Haiti for Canada in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake.
His book, C’était ça ou mourir, tells a similar story about a Haitian immigrant building a new life in a foreign land. Orelien was having a great year. His novel had set the literary world ablaze. He was about to become a household name.
Well, he is still a household name, but for the wrong reasons. The author’s trials began with an anonymous X account that accused Orelien of cheating after running excerpts of his book through an AI detection tool.
The novel had just won the Prix du roman Fnan, a prominent French Award. But Orelien could not celebrate. He was too busy defending himself against claims that 100 per cent of his novel was AI-generated.
The author denied the accusations, arguing that he had only deployed AI for research purposes. As far as the actual writing was concerned, every word on the page was his. So was the plot and the novel’s structure.
The publisher launched an investigation, working alongside Orelien to audit his creative process. Clearly, things did not go as planned (for Orelien) because the publisher has now cut ties with him.
They refuse to publish any of his books, past, present, or future. This scenario seems fairly straightforward. Rather than toiling honestly and tirelessly like his peers, an author tried to cut corners by relying on AI, and he paid the ultimate price.
His reputation is in tatters. No publisher will ever touch his work. The situation is truly that cut and dry, right? Wrong. Minotaur, a publisher under Macmillan US, agreed to pay $2M for Jerry Falade’s novel (Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body) after winning a hotly contested 14-way auction.
Falade was about to become a millionaire overnight. His life was about to change irrevocably. Then accusations of AI writing entered the picture, and the publisher backed out of the deal. Falade vehemently rejects the accusations.
Shy Girl by Mia Ballard was equally devastated by AI accusations. Tope Folarin argued in an article by The Atlantic that AI accusations are a weapon the world deploys primarily against black and brown authors.
The writer highlighted the plight of Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza, who won the 2026 Caine Prize for The Blue Fighter. Less than a week later, Vauhini Vara ( journalist) reported that she had scanned The Blue Fighter with Pangram (AI detection tool) and the entire story was AI-generated.
But again, isn’t that situation still relatively straightforward? Rather than doing the hard work, these authors thought they could take shortcuts to success by generating manuscripts with AI, and they got caught.
Their denials don’t prove anything because what else would you expect them to say? Better to plant seeds of doubt by denying these claims than to remove all doubt by admitting your wrongdoing.
Doubt leaves the door open for a potential comeback. So, we can just forget them and move on with our lives, right? Wrong. Do you remember the em dash (—) controversy from a few months ago?
Authors started panicking because their writing style naturally features em dashes, and large language models (AI) were suddenly gaining a reputation for using them in the text they generate. As a result, people started assuming that all text with numerous em dashes must be AI-generated.
In his defense, Falade argued that manuscripts he wrote in 2017 (before AI was a thing) are flagged as AI-generated when he scans them today. If you write frequently, you have also noticed that apps like Grammarly will routinely flag sentences that came straight from your brain as ‘AI-generated,’ leaving you to scratch your head in confusion.
AI is prone to mistakes. Tools like ChatGPT and Gemini generate false answers all the time, and AI detectors are themselves AI. So, why would you trust them to accurately differentiate between human and AI-generated text? Unfortunately, we have entered an age where the mere accusation of AI writing is enough to sink careers.
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