Philippe Jaenada, who won the Prix Goncourt on Tuesday for *L'Inconnue du quai de Javel*, told France Inter radio the next day that he had turned to AI "three times" while writing it.

The first was a sentence written by ChatGPT slipped into the narrative to "play with the reader" — and he says he 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, per The Guardian.

The other two uses, The Guardian reports, were a passage mocking ChatGPT's "completely absurd answers about a technical detail" and research for the book.

The reveal lands barely a day after the same prize's jury handed Jaenada its top honour — and just weeks after the Académie Goncourt removed Thélyson Orélien's debut *C'était ça ou Mourir* from its longlist over suspected AI use.

The academy said on 25 September that analyses showed that novel was "in all likelihood very largely the product of an artificial intelligence", and said it wanted to send "a clear message" that it did not endorse AI-generated texts.

The Times Now report adds a detail Jaenada's readers can verify themselves: pages 237 to 240 of *L'Inconnue du quai de Javel*, published by Flammarion, already describe his exchanges with ChatGPT and Claude, including questions about a technical detail relevant to his investigation.

He told *20 Minutes* before the ceremony, "Would a film director hide the fact that he uses special effects?", predicting it would soon be impossible to claim a text was 100% human-written — while insisting AI "will never be able to write a book with its heart, its soul, its memories".

The Guardian reports that online commentators saw a racial double standard in how the two cases were treated.

"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?" one user wrote on X; another said Jaenada faced "no media lynching, no banishment" — "a leniency denied to Thélyson Orélien".

Orélien called the accusations "slander and heresy" and said "not a single sentence in this book was created by a machine", though he admitted plagiarism in earlier work, and his Canadian publisher Boréal said new evidence showed AI use and cut ties with him.

Jaenada won in the first round of voting, six votes to three over Sylvain Prudhomme's *De l'autre côté du lake* — *De l'autre côté du lac* — for a novel reconstructing the unsolved 1949 murder of Louise Cansot, a 29-year-old artists' model known in Montparnasse as "the woman with 100 portraits".

The Goncourt comes with only a symbolic €10 cheque, but it is France's best-known and most closely watched literary award, so its handling of AI now carries real authority. The Guardian notes the Académie Goncourt, presided over by Philippe Claudel, has been approached for comment.

Jaenada, 62, framed AI as something to "acknowledge" and "tame": "I don't think AI can be held back. We can't pretend it doesn't exist... It has to be useful."

Times Now argues the more useful question for publishing is not whether an author ever consulted a chatbot, but what readers should be told when a machine's words enter a supposedly human work — and that the two French cases deserve scrutiny rather than automatic equivalence, since one involves limited, openly described experimentation and the other disputed claims of extensive machine authorship.