Christophe Mazzola

The thief took everything but the moon

On 25 September the Académie Goncourt withdrew Thélyson Orélien's novel, four days after he was accused of having written it with an artificial intelligence. Since then, texts he signed and other people wrote have surfaced almost daily, from a 2010 poem lifted from a Zen monk to opinion pieces translated from the Philippine press. All of it could have been checked for sixteen years with a search engine and a local library, and not one of his publishers bothered.