Goncourt winner Philippe Jaenada says he used ChatGPT three times, including one hidden sentence

Philippe Jaenada, who won the 2026 Prix Goncourt on November 3 for « L'Inconnue du quai de Javel », has said that ChatGPT played a small part in the book. Speaking on France Inter's morning show the next day, the 62-year-old novelist described three occasions on which he used the chatbot while writing.

What he said

According to accounts of the interview by Euronews, CGTV and Tech Times, the first use was a game with readers: Jaenada said he slipped a single sentence generated by ChatGPT into the novel. He did not say on air which sentence it is; the reports say he revealed it only to members of the Goncourt jury. The second use was to make fun of the tool, drawing on answers it gave to technical questions that he described as absurd. The third was research, where he said the chatbot genuinely helped. He gave no further detail on either point.

Jaenada framed his position as pragmatic rather than enthusiastic. As reported, he argued that writers cannot pretend AI does not exist, that it should be used openly and kept under control, and that it should not replace authors. Reactions on social media, as summarised by Euronews, were mixed: some readers compared such use to a spellchecker, while others said they wanted novels written by authors alone.

The book, published by Flammarion according to Euronews, investigates the unsolved murder of a young woman in Paris, continuing his earlier books built on historical criminal cases, such as « Sulak » and « La Serpe ».

The Orélien precedent

The remarks land in a sensitive context. On September 25, the Académie Goncourt removed Thélyson Orélien's novel « C'était ça ou mourir » from its second selection, saying in a statement, as reported by Next, that the book had in all likelihood been written very largely with AI. The case also involved plagiarism allegations, which Orélien acknowledged. Accounts differ on what he has conceded about AI: Next cited Libération as reporting a denial, while a later Euronews report said he admitted using AI for research. His Montreal publisher, Éditions du Boréal, ended its collaboration with him and said the book would not be reprinted.

Jaenada's case differs in scale and in that he disclosed it himself. It nonetheless leaves open how literary prizes will define acceptable AI use; the reports cited here include no comment from the Académie on his remarks.