AI tools from Alibaba and Founder do advertising grunt work

China's IT giants aim to change the advertising business with artificial intelligence tools meant to complement human creativity. Alibaba Group Holding boasts a system that can generate 20,000 lines of ad copy in a second. Founder Group, a company that originated at Peking University, has developed a tool for proofing the colorful and often chaotic flyers that are common in Japan. Using Alibaba's free AI Copywriter, merchants and marketers can produce ads on Alibaba-owned e-commerce websites such as Taobao and Tmall. Clients feed the system links to their product pages and choose what kind of copy they want -- say, promotional, functional, poetic or heartwarming.