What does it mean to read a poem, story, or novel about the human condition written entirely by a computer? This is not a crazy question. Legendary author Roald Dahl had already conjured up this nightmarish scenario for authors in one of his unnerving short stories in Someone Like You (1953). It tells the tale of the Great Automatic Grammatizator, a mammoth machine able to write prizewinning novels based on the works of living authors in 15 minutes flat. Dahl died before such a machine was within the realm of possibility.

Forbes has been publishing hundreds of articles a day for more than five years. As a Data Scientist, when I hear about that volume of data, the first thing that jumps to mind is: what can we learn from it? Are there best practices we can glean? We started by looking at what colleagues are doing with their own systems. We really enjoyed reading about BuzzFeed's in-house headline A/B testing system, about the New York Times' clever image cropping application, and also about the Washington Posts' feature-rich CMS-for-hire Arc Publishing, among others.

Every time students take a writing exercise on Quill.org–a Algorithms take account of every false word they type, every misplaced comma, every inappropriate conjunction, deepening a sense of where the nation's kids are succeeding in sentence-construction and where they need extra help. Instead of teachers having to correct errors late at night with a red pen, the system does it automatically, suggesting corrections and concepts on its own. The goal, says Peter Gault, who founded Quill three years ago, is to reach more students than traditional teaching methods, including those who need support the most. About 400,000 students in 2,000 schools have used the (mostly free) writing-instruction platform so far.

The best way to make your writing better is to show it to someone who knows the topic at least as well as you do. That someone can now be an artificial intelligence system that reads and learns faster and more deeply than a human can, says linguist and cognitive scientist Kieran Snyder. Her company, Textio, has launched a new AI web service called Opportunities that she says can figure out what you are trying to say and suggest better ways to do it--within 0.3 seconds. The claim is tempered by the fact that it's limited (for now) to helping companies with job postings and recruitment emails. Some of the examples Textio showed me: suggestions to replace "focused on" with "passionate about" or "expanding businesses" with "rapidly growing businesses."

AI experts believe that computers will write as well as humans within the next 15 years. This means that any student will be able to input a poorly-written essay into a software program, which will analyze the text and reconstruct it as well-written, grammatically correct text. Since we use calculators as an extension of our minds, shouldn't we also use AI software to become better writers? This is not a hypothetical question. Across the world, teams of computer scientists are racing at a breakneck speed to construct advanced artificial intelligence that can automate thinking and writing. Last month, AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence program created by Google, beat the world-champion Lee Sodel in Go, a game that is so complex that there are more choices available in a single game than there are atoms in the entire universe.