While some education experts applaud the advancement of hi-tech grammar tools as a way to help people more clearly express their thoughts, others aren’t so sure. Artificial intelligence, according to the contrarians, is only as smart as the humans who programme it, and often just as biased.

“Language is part of your heritage and identity, and if you’re using a tool that is constantly telling you, ‘You’re wrong,’ that is not a good thing,” says Paulo Blikstein, associate professor of communications, media and learning technology design at Columbia University Teachers College. “There is not one mythical, monolithical (English) … And every time we have tried to curtail the evolution of a language, it has never gone well.”

But the technology is also trickling down to more mundane tasks. That customer service agent you’re chatting with might be a bot, and your search results were likely influenced by what the tech giants know about you.

The increasing use of AI comes with some inherent risks, say the people who study it. Sometimes it’s not able to understand or gets requests wrong.

When it comes to AI-corrected grammar, Google’s Gmail update underlines incorrect grammar with a blue squiggly line. Clicking on the word in question reveals Google’s grammar suggestions. Microsoft introduced a machine learning based editor pane to Office 365 two years ago, while online tool Grammarly is a decade old, has over 20 million active users and recently rolled out a slew of new functions including grammar suggestions tailored to the tone of the piece the user is writing, according to the company.

Grammar editing tools aren’t new – just ask Microsoft’s much-maligned digital assistant Clippy – but the technology behind them is growing increasingly complex.

Grammarly said it uses a hybrid approach to build its algorithms, one that combines a variety of natural language processing methods, including machine learning, deep learning, and custom-made rules. In a recent Medium post, Grammarly research scientists discussed using statistical patterns inherent in a language (“the” typically does not follow another “the”, for example) to distinguish between correct and incorrect language.

Grammarly chief executive Brad Hoover says his company’s product was originally envisioned as one aimed at college students, and more than 1,000 educational institutions currently license Grammarly for their classrooms. “Our writing assistant is a coach, not a crutch,” says Hoover.

The tools can allow people to learn while they write, says Michelle Navarre Cleary, the founder of DePaul University’s School for New Learning Writing Programme and now the associate provost for learning at the non-profit educational institution College Unbound. She says research has consistently shown that teaching grammar through sentence diagramming and memorising parts of speech doesn’t necessarily leave students any better off.

“Saying that you have to crawl before you can run when it comes to writing – to name the parts of speech before you can start writing – is not only untrue, it’s counterproductive,” says Navarre Cleary. “It shuts people down instead of getting them thinking.”

In the end, most kids are likely to get a mixture of AI-assisted and traditional methods of writing education.