A new book prize is built for stories written with AI

A literary prize built for books written with AI has opened for entries. The Prix Pascal de Littérature IA asks writers to submit fiction co-written with tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. The winner is promised publication. It arrives after a year of arguments over whether AI quietly helped shape winners of other big awards.

What the prize asks for

• An unpublished manuscript of 10,000 to 50,000 words, written in French.
• Details of which AI model and which prompt produced the text.
• Any major language model is allowed, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and LLaMA.
• Entrants can live anywhere in the world.

A prompt is the instruction typed into an AI tool. Most prizes ask writers to avoid hiding AI use. This one asks entrants to show their work.

A twist in the rules

The prize wants fiction, but the terms add a condition. Submitted texts should help solve an ethical, social or ecological problem threatening humanity. The prize is named after Blaise Pascal, a French thinker who helped invent an early mechanical calculator and also wrote religious works, including Pensées.

Who is behind it

Three technology entrepreneurs founded it: Philippe Rodriguez, Albin Serviant and Gilles Mentré. Rodriguez is a founding partner at the advisory firm Avolta. Serviant is a digital media entrepreneur and former chair of the magazine Têtu. Mentré has a PhD in philosophy, teaches at Harvard and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and co-founded the online voting platform Electis.

Why now

The launch follows months of controversy over possible AI use by finalists and winners of several awards this year. These include the Commonwealth short story prize, the Caine prize and the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize. The Pascal prize takes the opposite approach and puts AI use up front.

What happens next

Entries opened on Tuesday through the prize's website and close at the end of November. A shortlist of 10 will be drawn up, and the winner will be named in early December. A jury of five or six writers, critics, journalists, philosophers and publishers will be announced in early November. The reporting does not say what the prize pays or which publisher will print the winning book.