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.

An artificial intelligence system that generates realistic stories, poems and articles has been updated, with some claiming it is now almost as good as a human writer. The text generator, built by research firm OpenAI, was originally considered "too dangerous" to make public because of the potential for abuse. But now a new, more powerful version of the system - that could be used to create fake news or abusive spam on social media - has been released. The BBC, along with some AI experts, decided to try it out. The model, called GPT-2, was trained on a dataset of eight million web pages, and is able to adapt to the style and content of the initial text given to it.

On Wednesday morning, in Britain's House of Commons, Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, rose to ask Prime Minister Theresa May a question. The night before, Parliament had passed an amendment expressing approval for the Brexit withdrawal agreement that May had painstakingly negotiated with the European Union, on one condition: that she renegotiate it. The amendment had been proposed by one of May's fellow Tories, Sir Graham Brady, and passed with her government's support. It demanded that she go straight to Brussels and tell the Europeans to ditch the part of the agreement dealing with the border between Northern Ireland, which is part of Britain, and the Republic of Ireland, which is a member of the E.U.--the most vexed aspect of Brexit. Those provisions would be replaced with what the Brady amendment, mysteriously and Britishly, refers to only as "alternative arrangements."

Theresa May is seeking further talks with EU leaders over the Brexit withdrawal agreement. MPs voted for an amendment that calls on the government to pursue "alternative arrangements" to replace the Northern Ireland backstop. The Brexit Secretary, Stephen Barclay, said there were a number of options. "There are issues in terms of having time limits, issues in terms of exit clauses, issues in terms of technology and this will be the nature of the negotiation with the EU in the coming days," he said. The EU says, however, it does not want to renegotiate or reopen the withdrawal agreement.