PRESS REVIEW – Wednesday, September 23: The papers look ahead to US President Donald Trump hosting his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. In other news, a Haitian-born novelist, tipped to win France’s prestigious Goncourt literary prize, has been struck by an AI scandal. Finally, could the remains of Nefertiti lie behind the burial chamber of Tutankhamun?
The Washington Post brings us details of what’s planned for Xi Jinping‘s state visit to Washington, complete with a five-jet flyover. Politico digs into the power dynamics between the Chinese and US leaders, as China is one of the winners of the global energy crisis. High on the agenda will be the topic of artificial intelligence, as The New York Times reports, after recent warnings from tech bosses about the dangers the technology could now pose. The journalist concludes, though, that neither will be open to restrictions that endanger their AI sector’s competitivity. According to Axios, one of the outcomes of this visit could be the creation of an “AI red telephone”: a direct hotline between the two presidents, in Cold War-era style, for the day “AI goes haywire”.
Meanwhile, after a social media user claimed author Thélyson Orélien’s novel had come up “100% AI” on Pangram, this controversy rocking the literary world is on the front page of Libération, with the headline “A novel doping on AI?” Journalists at Libération have run the text through GPTZero, a competitor of Pangram software, and also got a positive result for AI. The Haitian-born author says the media storm around him and his work is racially motivated, while the journalist at Libération calls on him to make public the chapters he says he initially wrote in 2017, prior to the existence of these mass-market AI tools. Le Figaro has interviewed a member of the Goncourt prize jury, who is reserving judgement for now, and insists that no software for detecting AI is infallible.
Finally, a group of researchers have requested permits to drill at a new location in Egypt‘s Valley of the Kings, in the hopes of finding Queen Nefertiti’s final resting place. As explained in The Times, Pharaoh Tutankhamun died young and is widely believed to have been buried in a tomb not originally built for him, but perhaps an outer chamber within a larger complex. Speculation has been rife for a decade that the burial complex was in fact that of Nefertiti, and new geophysical surveys suggest where additional corridors and chambers might be.
