Prix Goncourt Winner Philippe Jaenada Admits Using AI in Award-Winning Novel

The winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize has admitted using artificial intelligence while writing his award-winning novel, just one day after collecting the award. Philippe Jaenada, who won the Prix Goncourt on Tuesday for L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel), told France Inter radio on Wednesday that he had turned to AI “three times” while writing it.

Admission of AI Use

Jaenada said he first used AI to slip in a sentence written by ChatGPT in order to “play with the reader”. He said he had revealed which sentence it was only to the Goncourt jurors on the day of the award. If it gets out, I’ll know where it came from, he said. He also included a section of AI-generated text to poke fun at ChatGPT, which he said gave completely absurd answers about a technical detail, and for research. I don’t think AI can be held back. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist, said Jaenada, 62. You have to use it – but first you have to acknowledge it, and above all you have to tame it. It has to be useful.

Contrast with Another Author

The admission comes after the Académie Goncourt removed Thélyson Orélien’s book C’était ça ou Mourir (It Was That or Die) from its longlist in September. The Canadian-Haitian writer’s debut had been the breakout hit of France’s rentrée littéraire, selling more than 35,000 copies and winning the Prix du roman Fnac, before journalist Samuel Fitoussi ran it through the AI-detection tool Pangram and concluded that much of it had been machine-generated. In a statement on 25 September, the academy said analyses showed the novel was in all likelihood very largely the product of an artificial intelligence. In an October statement, Orélien described the allegations as slander and heresy, but later admitted plagiarism in earlier work. His Canadian publisher, Boréal, said new evidence showed AI had been used in the writing process and ended its relationship with him. This contrast has prompted accusations of a double standard online, with one user writing So when it’s an old white man it’s fine, but when it’s a young writer of colour he gets stoned in the public square?.

2026 Prix Goncourt: France's prestigious literary prize awarded to Philippe Jaenada • FRANCE 24

Jaenada defends AI use

Jaenada had defended using AI before the award. Would a film director hide the fact that he uses special effects? he asked in an interview with 20 Minutes, predicting that it would soon be impossible to say a text was 100% human-written. He insisted AI will never be able to write a book with its heart, its soul, its memories. Jaenada won the Prix Goncourt on the first round of voting, by six votes to three over Sylvain Prudhomme’s De l’autre côté du lac. His winning book reconstructs the unsolved 1949 murder of Louise Cansot, a 29-year-old Breton artists’ model known in Montparnasse as “the woman with 100 portraits”. The prize itself comes with only a symbolic €10 cheque, but it is France’s best known and most sought-after literary honour.