Goncourt winner Philippe Jaenada says he planted ChatGPT sentence in novel

Philippe Jaenada, winner of the 2026 Prix Goncourt for “L’Inconnue du quai de Javel,” said he used artificial intelligence three times while writing the novel, including by leaving a ChatGPT-generated sentence in the finished book for readers to identify. He described the uses as controlled experiments and research tools, not a substitute for his own work.

The novelist made the comments on France Inter the day after receiving the prize on Tuesday, Nov. 3. The Académie Goncourt awarded him six of its nine votes, against three for Sylvain Prudhomme. According to 20 Minutes, the AI episodes had already been set out on pages 237 to 240 of the book, which Flammarion published in August.

One use was the planted sentence, a game with readers whose identity Jaenada disclosed to the Goncourt jurors. A second involved asking ChatGPT and Claude whether paving stones or hair dry more quickly. He reproduced and commented on answers that he regarded as, at times, absurd, using the exchange to illustrate the systems’ capacity for nonsense.

His third use was for technical research connected with the book’s investigation of the 1949 murder of Louise Cansot, a 29-year-old woman found dead in Paris. The novel follows the case of the young Breton woman, an example of the intimate-crime form associated with Jaenada’s earlier work.

Jaenada argued that writers should use, acknowledge and learn to live with AI, while ensuring it does not replace them. He also suggested that AI involvement should no longer be concealed, and that a novel could identify a chapter written with the technology. His position places the Goncourt winner within a wider argument over disclosure and whether readers should be able to identify machine-generated passages.

The admission followed the removal of Thélyson Orélien’s “C’était ça ou mourir” from the Goncourt selection amid allegations of extensive AI use and plagiarism. As this publication reported in September, Orélien denied that AI had written his novel; detection results alone did not establish the extent of any machine generation. Jaenada’s account differs in that he has specified limited uses and incorporated the experiment into the published text.