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.

In 1950, computing pioneer Alan Turing posed a heretical question: Can machines think? Some 66 years later, the answer is clear. Evidence of machine learning is all around us. Execute a Google search and you'll reap the benefits of machine learning. When Google presents results to a user, the user votes on those results via a click.