The first non-European Pope in more than 1,000 years, the Oscar-winning star of Annie Hall and The Godfather, a soul legend and one of the world's most famous designers - here are some of the well-known faces no longer with us. Among those we remember are Hollywood stars Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and Gene Hackman, and theatrical dames Joan Plowright and Patricia Routledge. Robert Redford's acting career spanned more than 50 films and won him an Oscar as a director. For many filmgoers though, he was simply the best-looking cinema star in the world - once described as a chunk of Mount Rushmore levered into stonewashed denims. As well as leading roles in hits such as All The President's Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Way We Were, Redford also launched the Sundance Film Festival to champion independent filmmakers. Los-Angeles-born Keaton shot to fame with her role in The Godfather, but enjoyed a long creative partnership with Woody Allen. Annie Hall, a comedy based on their off-screen relationship, earned her a Best Actress Oscar and they collaborated on several other films. She was nominated for three further Oscars - all in the best actress category - for her work in Something's Gotta Give, Marvin's Room and Reds. BASIL! - the unmistakable sound of Sybil Fawlty admonishing her pompous and incompetent husband, is probably how Prunella Scales will best be remembered. Apart from starring in sitcom Fawlty Towers, she played many other roles on screen and stage, including Queen Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett's play, A Question of Attribution.

Just over half (51%) of published novelists in the UK say that artificial intelligence is likely to end up entirely replacing their work as fiction writers, a new report from the University of Cambridge has found. Close to two-thirds (59%) of novelists say they know their work has been used to train AI Large Language Models (LLMs) without permission or payment. Over a third (39%) of novelists say their income has already taken a hit from generative AI, for example due to loss of other work that facilitates novel writing. Most (85%) novelists expect their future income to be driven down by AI. In new research for Cambridge's Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy (MCTD), Dr Clementine Collett surveyed 258 published novelists earlier this year, as well as 74 industry insiders - from commissioning editors to literary agents - to gauge how AI is viewed and used in the world of British fiction.*

World's biggest company Nvidia stuns Wall Street as it gives biggest clue yet to state of US economy'Triple whammy' will decide if Wall Street crashes within the next day A senior White House official has told me the REAL threat to Trump. Epstein is a humiliating distraction. But he's losing grip fast... this could be fatal: ANDREW NEIL Secret reasons Ronaldo was desperate to meet Trump... and what he REALLY wants from the president Melania Trump delivers'dystopian' speech to troops sparking meltdown Kevin Spacey reveals he is currently homeless and'living in hotels' as he admits his financial situation is'not great' - two years after he was cleared of sexual assault allegations Female health inspector sparks internet firestorm over video of her pouring BLEACH all over unlicensed taco vendor's food Haunting final words of boy, 12, 'tortured by lesbian wives' until he shrunk and died Nancy Mace leaks wild sexts about Republican colleague: 'You will be a good girl' Full-faced Britney Spears looks unrecognizable as she carries Champagne flute from wine bar, then drives away... AGAIN: Family speak out on'nightmare' spiral'The Mamdani effect' goes berserk: Desperate New Yorkers fight over multimillion-dollar homes outside city... prices jump 24% in five DAYS All the scandals of the 1939 Wizard of Oz: How Judy Garland was drugged and starved in an'iron corset', actors DIED and one had an eyelid burned off... not to mention the drunken orgies SARAH VINE: Meghan the Domestic Goddess is back - and she's in full festive flow. Meghan Markle goes barefaced as she poses on cover of Harper's Bazaar magazine Doctors warn'overprescribed' medical test use has DOUBLED despite raising the risk of cancer by three times Deep red state of Utah will see its population swell by TWO MILLION by 2065 thanks to'net-in migration' READ MORE: Can you spot the AI-generated faces? Britain boasts some of the best authors in the world - but they could soon be replaced by AI, a disturbing report reveals.

Few fantasies are harder to wipe away than the romance of a clean slate. Every January, when we're twitchy with regret and self-loathing, advertisers blare, "New Year, new you," urging us to jettison our failures and start fresh. In fiction, self-reinvention is a perennial theme, often shadowed by the suspicion that it can't be done. Lately, novelists have put a political spin on the idea, counterposing hopeful acts of individual self-fashioning to the immovable weight of circumstance. Halle Butler's "The New Me" (2019), a millennial office satire, finds its temp heroine, Millie, trying to life-hack her way out of loneliness and professional drift--buy a plant, whiten her teeth, make friends, think positive.

I've been working in games for a little more than 15 years, and the main thing I'd say about it at this point is that it's a pretty annoying job to explain at parties. People often say something like, "Oh, I don't really play games," which is surely an odd thing to tell a game designer moments after you've been introduced; I don't really eat croissants, but that's not the first thing I bring up if I meet a patissier. So one of the joys of publishing my first novel last year was the option to sidestep all of that, and say: "Oh, I'm a writer." I wrote a novel; I'm working on another one; job done, the conversation can move on. Nobody says, "Oh, I don't really read books," even though that's at least as likely to be true.

Please spare a thought for artificial intelligence (AI). It may not have feelings yet but, if it did, it would feel devastated by all the nasty things people are saying about it. All it's trying to do is take our jobs and potentially destroy the world and people can't stop being mean. Exhibit one: a recent controversy with the organisation that runs National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a yearly challenge to produce a manuscript in a month. In a recent statement, NaNoWriMo wrote that it doesn't explicitly support or condemn any approach to writing, "including the use of AI". Further: "The categorical condemnation of artificial intelligence has classist and ableist undertones … questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

After getting through the setup pleasantries, that's all you're left with when you start a new draft on the Freewrite Alpha. No spell check, no AI-powered notes on your grammar, and most certainly no other browser tabs to distract you from the ultimate goal of getting words down on the page. Instead, Freewrite has taken its already distraction-free writing experience and shrunk the price tag some by cutting the Alpha's screen down to almost nothing. I might not be a novelist, but between news posts and reviews, I write somewhere in the region of 20,000 words a week. So, I thought, what better way to test a writing machine than to use it exclusively for a full week, to see how it holds up to the rigors of the online journalist's grind?

ChatGPT seems to have blindsided us all. In less than a year it has proved that it can make writers redundant, which is one of the reasons why the Writers Guild of America recently went on strike, and why a group of novelists, including Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult and George RR Martin, are pursuing a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company that owns the chatbot. Imitation that appears to be original writing. From my experiments, it's obvious that ChatGPT's current level of literary sophistication is weak – it is cliche-prone and generally unconvincing – but who knows how it will develop? Writers like stretching our imaginations, coming up with ideas, working out storylines and plots, creating believable characters, overcoming creative challenges and working on a full-length piece of work over an extended period of time. Most of us write our books ourselves and while we are influenced by other writers, we're not a chatbot that has been trained on hundreds of thousands of novels for the sole purpose of mimicking human creativity. Imagine a future where those who are most adept at getting AI to write creatively will dominate, while we writers who spend a lifetime devoted to our craft are sidelined. OK, this is a worst‑case scenario, but we have to consider it, because ChatGPT and the other Large Language Models (LLMs) out there have been programmed to imagine a future that threatens many creative professions. ChatGPT is already responding to the questions I ask it in seconds, quite reliably. It is an impressive beast, but one that needs to be tamed.

Imagine you are working on your novel on your home computer. It's nearly finished; you have already written approximately one million words. All of a sudden, the online word processing software tells you that you can no longer open the draft because it contains illegal information. Within an instant, all your words are lost. This is what happened in June to a Chinese novelist writing under the alias Mitu.

Authors experiencing writer's block could soon have a new way to help develop the next section of their story. Researchers at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology recently introduced a new technology that forecasts the future development of an ongoing written story. In their approach, researchers first characterize the narrative world using over 1,000 different "semantic frames," where each frame represents a cluster of concepts and related knowledge. A predictive algorithm then looks at the preceding story and predicts the semantic frames that might occur in the next 10, 100, or even 1,000 sentences in an ongoing story. Unlike current automated text generated methods, the researchers' approach could help authors to craft language for the follow-up story arc beyond the scope of a few sentences, a limitation of existing models.