The winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize has admitted using artificial intelligence while writing his novel, barely a day after collecting an award whose jury had thrown out another book over suspected AI use.

Philippe Jaenada, who won the Prix Goncourt on Tuesday for L’Inconnue du quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel), told France Inter radio on Wednesday that he had turned to AI “three times” while writing it.

The first, he said, was to slip in a sentence written by ChatGPT in order to “play with the reader”. He said he had 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.

He also included a section of AI-generated text to poke fun at ChatGPT, which gave “completely absurd answers about a technical detail”, and for research.

“I don’t think AI can be held back. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist,” said Jaenada, 62.…