The event of the book

The event of the book "It was that or Die" by Thélyson Orélien struck me. I was among people whose trust in the Parisian publishers is easy to shake: do they check whether their books are AI-generated?

Several clues triggered a public reaction. Filters like Pangram were run on the text, compared with earlier writings by the same author, and with other books of the September 2026 rentrée. While it seems awful to denounce an author in public, it also seems fair to ask for a journalist’s investigation and for answers from the publisher, who denied the accusations.

I find that it's perfectly ok to throw a cat among the pigeons. Duchamp made it with the urinal, and Maurizio Cattelan sold "Comedian" for $6.2 million: as long as it’s visible in plain sight and openly a pun about art.

Of course, there is a narrative creation in this book, and personal intent: the author is a Haitian migrant who wanted to communicate the hardships of fleeing Haiti, or why staying meant dying*

I think that publishers ignored the question, or didn't recognize it, or didn't dare to treat AI inspiration as something to be answered in the open.

Barthes's death of the author pretends that nobody cares about the origins of a work of art. So far, people do care about authorship, or at least about process, the "stream of consciousness". It's not a mystery if you are an artist on instagram. Process gathers more views and followers than a finished artwork. People want the reasons, the ideas, the whereabouts of an artwork, and why a person would be obsessed with filling a blank page with words, a blank canvas with colors.

Without that public interest in how things are made, the scandal would not have happened. This affair could be the cornerstone of a duller acceptance: that most public creations will soon be AI-made. The Parisian elite always relied on scandals to sell books, painting, or fashion. No sex scandal this time, for once.

Still, as an internet meme put it plainly, we wished AI would take the menial tasks such as cleaning, wiping dirt, dishwasher etc. and leave us the most rewarding ones: acts of creation. Does this story say otherwise? Is the goal of life to live in the luxury of a permanent feed, filled by AI content? What happens when we mimic AI in our conversations, our language, our art? Worse: when we obey the machine to promote our work to the panopticon through SEO, choosing our words and optimizing our own individuality. That is a path of misery.

Our remaining freedom would be the ability to create, to write physically, to use our own eyes and judgment, to forge ideas sung in our own voice, a cappella.

Each time free will steps off the patterns we were taught to repeat, there is an act of creation. There was certainly such an act in Orélien’s novel, but there may also have been an undeclared tool. That is tolerable only if it’s public. 

I could object that David Hockney showed Caravaggio secretly used lenses to paint, and so produced the chiaroscuro everyone later wanted. Nobody noticed before the publishing of "Secret Knowledge" in 2001.

Authorship, helped or not by technologies, will remain… unless a regulation tries to police it out of existence. What might disappear are experts, publishers, galleries, schools when they fail the public’s trust.

All replaced by AI?

*The destination, USA and Canada, the uprooting, the changes of immigration on consciousness and personality, all this deserves a book, many books. I read several good ones in recent years. Madeleine Thien, or Gish Jen, made quite an impact. The Brutalist by Brady Corbet is powerful too, even if the viewer is punished by the violence of certain scenes; metaphors perhaps, for what happens when migration goes wrong.