Philippe Jaenada, the winner of the 2026 Prix Goncourt, has admitted to 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. The Guardian reported his remarks on November 5, and they have revived a debate that African and diaspora writers have been at the center of all year.
Jaenada, 62, won the Goncourt on Tuesday, November 3, for L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel), a true-crime novel about the 1949 murder of a Paris life model. The next day he told France Inter radio that he had turned to AI three times while writing it. The first time, he slipped in a sentence written by ChatGPT in order to “play with the reader,” and he told only the Goncourt jurors which sentence it was, on the day of the award. He also included a passage of AI-generated text to poke fun at ChatGPT, which had given absurd answers about a technical detail, and he used the tool for research. He told the radio that AI can’t be held back and that writers must acknowledge it, tame it, and make it useful.
He had defended the practice before the prize. In an interview with 20 Minutes, he compared AI to special effects in film, asking whether a director would hide them, and predicted that it will soon be impossible to say a text is 100 percent human-written. He insisted, however, that AI will never be able to write a book with a heart, soul, or memories.
The admission comes after the Académie Goncourt dropped Thélyson Orélien’s debut novel, C’était ça ou mourir (It Was Either That or Die), from its longlist in September. The Canadian-Haitian writer’s book had been the breakout hit of France’s rentrée littéraire, selling more than 35,000 copies and winning the Prix du roman Fnac, before the journalist Samuel Fitoussi ran it through the AI-detection tool Pangram and concluded that much of it was machine-generated. In a statement on September 25, the Académie said analyses by researchers and journalists showed that the novel was very likely largely the product of AI, and that it wanted to send a clear message that it does not endorse AI-assisted texts. The Guardian notes that the accuracy of AI-detection software has been called into question.
Orélien rejected the allegations in an October statement, saying not a single sentence was created by a machine, though in the same statement he admitted plagiarism in earlier work and apologized for presenting texts that were not his as his own. A week later, his Canadian publisher, Boréal, said new evidence showed AI had been used in the writing process, contrary to the author’s assurances, and ended its relationship with him.
The contrast has prompted accusations of a racial double standard online. One X user asked whether it is fine when the writer is an old white man but a young writer of color gets stoned in the public square, and another said Jaenada faced no media lynching over his AI use, a leniency denied to Orélien.
The conversation has run through Brittle Paper’s coverage for weeks. When The Atlantic reported that Pangram had flagged Caine Prize winner Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza’s story “The Blue Fighter,” the African literary community pushed back. This week the Prize confirmed him as the winner after a review that found no evidence of generative AI use. The Goncourt has also long mattered to African literature. In 2021, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr became the first sub-Saharan African winner, and in 2024, writers from Burundi and Algeria won the Renaudot and the Goncourt.
The Caine Prize has already responded by requiring AI declarations from publishers and shortlisted writers for its 2027 edition. The Goncourt has not yet said whether Jaenada’s disclosure changes anything, and the question of where a prize should draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable AI use is far from settled.
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