The spectacular fall from grace of Haitian-Canadian writer Thélyson Orélien in many ways resembles our own culture war over Jason Arday. The celebrated author, feted in TV studios and in the literary salons of Québec and Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés for his hard-hitting descriptions of the migrant experience, was accused on X both of serial plagiarism and of using artificial intelligence to write his latest novel. His accusers decried the soft bigotry of low expectations that caused the woke intelligentsia to turn a blind eye to mediocrity because their hero was a capital-B Black man. His defenders, just as in Arday’s case, tried to dismiss the original accuser as an extremist (the anonymous account responsible turned out to be run by Samuel Fitoussi, a columnist for the right-wing Le Figaro). They also attempted to cast the affair as the work of a racist lynch mob. The leftie magazine Les Inrockuptibles even came up with the thrillingly Stalinist line that “in this affair, whether the accusation is well-founded is not what matters most.”

Orélien has denied the accusations. Literary sleuths have pointed out that Pangram – the AI detector that has marked up swaths of the text of his novel C’était ça ou Mourir as nonhuman – is prone to false positives, wrongly flagging pages of classic French literature written long before the advent of AI. That, however, has not stopped the committee of the Prix Goncourt, France’s equivalent of the Booker Prize (not known as a hotbed of reactionary politics), dropping Orélien’s book from this year’s shortlist.

But l’affaire Orélien poses a far more serious question for our times than the obvious one about race relations. What would it mean if a novel part-written by........

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