From Shakespeare to Austen, many writers will go down in history for their unique and engaging storytelling.
But writers in the future may have competition when it comes to their stories, poems and articles - in the form of an artificial intelligence sytem.
Tech firm OpenAI has developed a text generator, which many claim is now almost as good as a human writer.
The system, dubbed GPT-2, was trained using a dataset of eight million web pages.
This rigorous training means the AI can churn out text in different styles, ranging from Shakespeare poems to news articles.
Tristan Greene, a reporter at The Next Web , described the AI as ‘more dangerous than any gun.’
He wrote: “I'm terrified of GPT-2 because it represents the kind of technology that evil humans are going to use to manipulate the population - and in my opinion that makes it more dangerous than any gun.”
However, not everyone has been so impressed.
Noel Sharkey, a computer science expert at the University of Sheffield, called the AI’s writing ‘laughable.’
Speaking to the BBC he said: “I tested the software with numerous headlines and got laughable results. For example, for 'Turkeys hate Christmas', I got that 'Turkey is the only nation in the world that doesn't celebrate Christmas' and a number of unrelated sentences.
"For ' Boris Johnson loves the backstop', it produced incoherent gibberish and some stuff about AI and sport. When I input the statement that 'Boris Johnson hates the backstop', I got a more coherent story that appears to have been pulled off a Google search."
It remains unclear how OpenAI plans to use GPT-2 in the future.
