On how much text? There's a fair few reports that it's quite inaccurate when given smaller samples of text, and if you go cherry-picking the odds will likely go up even further.
My neighbours regularly remind me that AI is quite different in French - despite being Francophone they tend to use it in English for what they think are better results.
It's entirely plausible detection is totally different in different languages.
Note 'Balance ton Claude' is an oblique reference to 'Balance ton porc', what's commonly considered the French equivalent of the US #MeToo cultural event
Sure, and expectations were met here by the readers[0]. Otherwise there would have been no award in the first place. It's just this random group with an axe to grind that's trying to stir up trouble.
You're missing 2 key bits of context: the when and the stated reason. Goncourt had the novel on their long list until this accusation surfaced, and explicitly stated that they removed it not because they found the content lacking after all (which would be a strange retrospective), but because they "had taken note of the AI and plagiarism accusations"[0] and acted thus. Goncourt has no idea if the novel was primarily done by AI or not, but they're going with the narrative because they have their brand to protect. Heck even the mud-slinging group had to use a tool, because they have no idea otherwise. And there's still not 100% certitude; all they have is a "very likely", but their narrative took like a flame to a dry forest because of the current AI controversy.
I'm not going on a political rant. I was just saying it's fair to be transparent and disclose significant AI use.
From your previous message, you seem to not understand the key differences between a spellchecker and a LLM, and as a result, why generating a whole book winning author contest could be seen as controversial.
> Heck even the mud-slinging group had to use a tool
Agreed. It’s not like a particular word is any different when it’s made by ai.
Would we care if someone used a typewriter vs a computer to write it.
This looks like a weird snobbishness. The fact that it’s by Europeans makes it more funny since they have been left out of the AI race.
In the end you have a final product. Can critique it on its own. He used ai to help write it and you couldn’t tell before, says more about the product and perhaps you don’t like what it says about you .
>He is also a finalist for the most prestigious annual French language awards, the Goncourt and the Renaudot, set to be issued soon.
If I had a book that was hoping to win this award, anonymous accusations like this seem like a pretty easy way to shift the odds. It's impossible for the author to disprove the allegations and the award committee will want to 'avoid controversy'
He's been revealed as a flagrant plagiarist [1] and there's a lot of evidence that his writing before 2023 had very low pangram scores, and the other authors nominated did not have high pangram scores.
This isn't the first high profile case of a black person being reported with accusations of using AI this year[^1][^2]. Once or twice, sure, whatever. But a third time now? It's hard to think this isn't anything but targeted, especially given this particular case the group making the "claims" are entirely anonymous.
Is it that, or is it because marketing "content" by a minority author with an "interesting life story" is an industry not an art, and they're less likely to care how the "content" was produced?
Pangram is making the "claims", not some group. It is known to have a very low false positive rate, especially on long texts.
And there is now also evidence of plagiarism, rather than just AI writing, in his other work (see down thread).
The longer a text, the more entropy, the easier it is to classify. Novels are pretty long. So I suspect the false positive rate for books is far lower than for articles. And, as I said, we also have corroborating evidence now in form of cases of plagiarism discovered in his past work. Someone who has no qualms about committing plagiarism is more likely to also not have inhibitions about using LLMs to write books.
“It was just a coincidence that most American slaves were black”
I don’t think anyone is saying skin color conveys immunity from accusation. But I hope you can see that the odds that a dramatically higher per capita rate of accusations against people with a particular skin color should at least give pause.
How many non black people have been accused though?
Why would they target these specific 3 black authors? I assume there are hundreds/thousands of successful black authors, 3 "this year" seems very small to call it a targeted attack
Depends on how you define «they», but the public discourse in Norway the past two weeks have been defined by the Norwegian news outlet Manifest Media publishing a series of articles about AI “meat proxying”, starting whith an analysis of commentators employed by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK). The one found guilty was a white woman, and among the four non-guilty was one non-white man: https://www.manifestmedia.no/artikler/slik-testet-vi-nrk-for... A follow-up article targetting (white male) professor Asle Toje found that he had probably used AI to write a much-discussed opinion piece: https://www.manifestmedia.no/artikler/pangram-tojes-omstridt...
Race has not been a part of the public conversation. Not sure if it would have been that way if the guilty person was non-white (but I'm slightly optimistic, given that the first person found guilty was a woman and gender was not part of the discussion).
It's hard to think this isn't anything but targeted
By whom?
A simpler (and easy to think of) explanation is normal systemic racism. Black writers are likely underrepresented in the training data begin with, so the models assume Black writing can't be real.
It is possible that the works of black people are tested more, possibly by racist people systemically putting them through Pangram in hope of getting a hit.
If that's the case, unfortunately, they're bound to find legitimate fraud eventually. Given the subsequent hard evidence of plagiarism, it seems like this is one such case, and we can't exactly ignore it.
I remain convinced the whole notion of AI-detection algorithms with any semblance of precision and accuracy is a con.
Critics say the author almost exclusively relied on AI to create his work, based on Pangram’s findings.
Pangram says it “is trained specifically to detect the latest AI models from frontier labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, xAI, and more. [They] benchmark against 26 models (so far)…”.
I can probably list more than 26 models off the top of my head. Granted, some models have been distilled against others and will be “detectable” but that’s NOWHERE near a large enough sample size to be reliable in 2026.
You or I could get a flag by that detector in our first attempt, and it wouldn’t take long for a false positive against enough attempts of truly original thought either.
The only thing I’d actually believe is things like Claude’s text watermarking system. However, those systems will never be present for EVERY model, so reliable blanket detection remains an impossibility.
The entropy in written text of meaningful length is simply too great for detection to be reliably possible in 2026, especially considering the changes the author can make.
The author behind the twitter account has been discovered [1] (source in french and behind paywall). It's team leaded by a french essayist and journalist at "Le Figaro" named Samuel Fitoussi.
There's important extra context on this case in that the author has been discovered to be a flagrant plagiarist. He won an award in 2014 for a work which was almost entirely ripped from a French novel in the 60s.
This was discussed a lot on the news here. Couple of authors feed their pre AI books to pangram and also got false positive. Maybe it is AI, maybe not. But using AI to accuse someone else of using AI is ironic.
Can you post some links? I know some authors said that, but had used a different tool than Pangram, and I don't expect non-technical people to understand the difference. Pangram is reputedly the best of them and personally I couldn't get a single false positive on my own work (both French and English).
* Media ran the entire novel through Pangram and got a 94% AI score [1], whereas all other Goncourt finalists, Haitian/African novels and French classics they tested came out as 100% human. I recall they also tested works specifically from before and after the AI boom and found a shift, but I don't remember where I saw that.
* People on social media, as well as traditional media, have then found cases of blatant plagiarism in Orelien's work a decade ago (this includes one prized short story and several posts to blogs and media) [2]
I think we have to be careful not to assume that tools like Pangram are completely accurate and the word of God, but we can't dismiss them outright, and this particular author's history of plagiarism makes it much harder to give him the benefit of doubt.
> ""We tested several passages, from different bits of the manuscript, to come up with the identical result: 100 percent AI," the group said on X."
I.e. they're using AI output a black-box truth oracle, without understanding how it works, or being able to independently reproduce its conclusions as human thinkers.
Any Francophones, does the book sound like AI? I find that in English a lot of the time that something is accused of being AI-written and people cast aspersions on the quality of AI detectors, that when you read the text it’s immediately obvious as AI: chock full of em-dashes, not-x-but-y constructions, unnatural metaphors, and so on.
The first two chapters can be read online. The text is full of metaphors (many nonsensical), staccato sentences and X not Y constructions. The rule of three comes up every other sentence, often combined with a zeugma. No em-dashes though!
Why use AI to write at all, I wonder? Writing is the fun part. I'm not interested in having my bot eat my ice cream for me either.
I do use AI to help learn concepts, to grammar check and spell check, and to find errors. And I always tell it not to rewrite anything. I'll fix it myself, thank you.
It's always fun to see stuff I wrote decades ago get flagged as genai, though.
I am with you, AI is a tool, and it matters how you use it.
I believe overuse of AI will be detrimental to your cognitive function, because the brain, like most organs in your body needs "exercise" to function well.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 25.9 ms ] threadIt's entirely plausible detection is totally different in different languages.
Sounds familiar
Excellent use of AI? Disclose it and avoid the fuss.
[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prix_du_roman_Fnac
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/26/europe/frances-goncourt-p...
From your previous message, you seem to not understand the key differences between a spellchecker and a LLM, and as a result, why generating a whole book winning author contest could be seen as controversial.
> Heck even the mud-slinging group had to use a tool
Yes, and they disclose it.
Lots of short sentences. Lots of weird metaphors. Many infamous "it's not x, it's y".
"Why do you care is there is horse meat in your beef burger patties if it tastes good" vibe
Would we care if someone used a typewriter vs a computer to write it.
This looks like a weird snobbishness. The fact that it’s by Europeans makes it more funny since they have been left out of the AI race.
In the end you have a final product. Can critique it on its own. He used ai to help write it and you couldn’t tell before, says more about the product and perhaps you don’t like what it says about you .
If I had a book that was hoping to win this award, anonymous accusations like this seem like a pretty easy way to shift the odds. It's impossible for the author to disprove the allegations and the award committee will want to 'avoid controversy'
[1] https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/litterature/2026-09-23/thelyson...
[^1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/featu...
[^2]: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/jason-arday-re...
I don’t think anyone is saying skin color conveys immunity from accusation. But I hope you can see that the odds that a dramatically higher per capita rate of accusations against people with a particular skin color should at least give pause.
Why would they target these specific 3 black authors? I assume there are hundreds/thousands of successful black authors, 3 "this year" seems very small to call it a targeted attack
Race has not been a part of the public conversation. Not sure if it would have been that way if the guilty person was non-white (but I'm slightly optimistic, given that the first person found guilty was a woman and gender was not part of the discussion).
By whom?
A simpler (and easy to think of) explanation is normal systemic racism. Black writers are likely underrepresented in the training data begin with, so the models assume Black writing can't be real.
If that's the case, unfortunately, they're bound to find legitimate fraud eventually. Given the subsequent hard evidence of plagiarism, it seems like this is one such case, and we can't exactly ignore it.
Critics say the author almost exclusively relied on AI to create his work, based on Pangram’s findings.
Pangram says it “is trained specifically to detect the latest AI models from frontier labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, xAI, and more. [They] benchmark against 26 models (so far)…”.
I can probably list more than 26 models off the top of my head. Granted, some models have been distilled against others and will be “detectable” but that’s NOWHERE near a large enough sample size to be reliable in 2026.
You or I could get a flag by that detector in our first attempt, and it wouldn’t take long for a false positive against enough attempts of truly original thought either.
The only thing I’d actually believe is things like Claude’s text watermarking system. However, those systems will never be present for EVERY model, so reliable blanket detection remains an impossibility.
The entropy in written text of meaningful length is simply too great for detection to be reliably possible in 2026, especially considering the changes the author can make.
[1] https://www.lefigaro.fr/culture/qui-se-cache-derriere-le-com...
https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/litterature/2026-09-23/thelyson...
* Media ran the entire novel through Pangram and got a 94% AI score [1], whereas all other Goncourt finalists, Haitian/African novels and French classics they tested came out as 100% human. I recall they also tested works specifically from before and after the AI boom and found a shift, but I don't remember where I saw that.
* People on social media, as well as traditional media, have then found cases of blatant plagiarism in Orelien's work a decade ago (this includes one prized short story and several posts to blogs and media) [2]
I think we have to be careful not to assume that tools like Pangram are completely accurate and the word of God, but we can't dismiss them outright, and this particular author's history of plagiarism makes it much harder to give him the benefit of doubt.
[1] (French) https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/fr/nouvelle/2286476/thelyson...
[2] (French) https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/litterature/2026-09-23/thelyson...
I.e. they're using AI output a black-box truth oracle, without understanding how it works, or being able to independently reproduce its conclusions as human thinkers.
Perfectly healthy habit for society to normalize.
I do use AI to help learn concepts, to grammar check and spell check, and to find errors. And I always tell it not to rewrite anything. I'll fix it myself, thank you.
It's always fun to see stuff I wrote decades ago get flagged as genai, though.
I believe overuse of AI will be detrimental to your cognitive function, because the brain, like most organs in your body needs "exercise" to function well.