Goncourt winner Philippe Jaenada defends his "playful" use of AI in prize-winning novel

Philippe Jaenada, winner of France's top literary award, the Prix Goncourt, has defended his "playful," "ironic" and very limited use of AI in his novel "L'Inconnue du quai de Javel," AFP reported. "It is ridiculously absurd to think for half a second that I used generative AI to write anything at all in this book," he said in a statement sent by his publisher, Flammarion.

Jaenada said he used AI three times. He asked AI chatbots a question and received "comically precise, and therefore stupid, and contradictory answers"; he used AI for research; and he hid in the text a sentence of about 10 words generated by AI, which readers have since tried to guess. He had first admitted the AI use on France Inter radio the day after winning the prize, Euronews reported, and revealed the hidden sentence to the Goncourt jurors on the day of the award.

The statement comes amid a backlash against authors over alleged AI use. Haitian-Canadian author Thélyson Orélien, once considered a frontrunner for the prize, had his novel withdrawn from the shortlist, and his publisher later confirmed he had used AI to help write the book and ended its ties with him.