Prix Goncourt winner Philippe Jaenada admits ChatGPT use

Philippe Jaenada, 62, told France Inter radio he used ChatGPT "three times" while writing L'Inconnue du quai de Javel, the novel that won him the 2026 Prix Goncourt on November 3, as reported by The Guardian. One use was a sentence generated by the chatbot that Jaenada slipped into the text to "play with the reader." He only disclosed that sentence to the Goncourt jury on Tuesday, after the vote.

The second use, he said, was to mock the chatbot by including its "completely absurd answers about a technical piece of data." The third was technical research for a book that reconstructs the unsolved 1949 killing of Louise Cansot, a 29-year-old artists' model from Brittany whose body was found beside the Seine. Flammarion published the novel on August 12; Jaenada took the Goncourt on the first ballot with six votes, ahead of Sylvain Prudhomme's three.

Writers "cannot push AI away," Jaenada said, and must "use it, we have to acknowledge it, we have to tame it and not let ourselves be replaced."

The admission lands after another shortlisted novel, Thélyson Orélien's C'était ça ou mourir, was pulled from Goncourt consideration over plagiarism allegations and evidence of AI use discovered by his publisher. The jury has not said publicly how it reconciled the two cases.