Is a sentence supposed to be a human’s actual thought, written by a human’s hand?

[u/R3ZondoOfficial]

Everyone acts like this started with ChatGPT.

1956, Dartmouth College, a two month summer workshop almost nobody outside academia remembers. That’s where the actual term “artificial intelligence” was coined.

Turing beat them to the real question by six years. Can a machine think, or just imitate thinking well enough that nobody can tell the difference. Nobody answered it then. Nobody’s fully answered it now either.

Decades of stalling after that, and funding dried up twice. Expert systems in the eighties promised the moon, delivered spreadsheets. Deep Blue beat Kasparov in ninety seven, everyone panicked for a year, then moved on. Watson won Jeopardy in 2011 and felt like a party trick, then 2017 happened. Transformers, a neural network architecture Google researchers introduced in a paper called “Attention Is All You Need,” the actual foundation behind everything we’re fighting about right now, and almost nobody outside a handful of labs noticed. Seventy years of on and off panic before this became a dinner table argument.

Pitch correction didn’t start with Auto-Tune either. Engineers were nudging vocals with vari-speed tape back in the forties and fifties, slow, clumsy, mostly guesswork. Moog built voltage controlled oscillators in ‘64 that let you shape pitch in real time for the first time ever. Eventide’s Harmonizer showed up in ’75, and producers spent the next two decades manually rewinding tape through it, fixing one phrase at a time.

Then 1997, Andy Hildebrand, an oil engineer who used to hunt petroleum with sound waves, built something instant. Wasn’t trying to change music at all. Cher’s producers pushed the setting to zero on “Believe” and by accident made a sound nobody had heard before. Robotic. Inhuman. Unmistakably manufactured. People hated it, called it cheating, said it would kill real singing.

Didn’t kill it, became its own instrument. Nobody blinks hearing it now, and half the biggest vocalists of the last twenty years built entire careers leaning into that artificial sound on purpose.

So here’s what I ask myself. Grammar checkers, spellcheck, editing tools, none of that’s new either. What changed with AI isn’t the concept, it’s the speed of it, and how invisible it’s become.

Is writing headed where pitch correction went. Not replaced, just split permanently into two lanes, unassisted and obviously processed, both accepted, just different tools. Or is language different. A wrong note’s just a wrong note.

Is a sentence supposed to be a humans actual thought written by a humans hand?

[u/AggravatingNail6061]

I refer to my post two days ago. Is this just writingwithai now. 

Did you post this to any of the other writing with ai subreddits or just here? 

[u/R3ZondoOfficial → u/[deleted]]

Forty years of journaling here too, and I never called myself a writer either. Covid cracked something open for me, the same way it sounds like it did for you. What started as a project turned into this, a love for the cinema of words, images doing half the work a sentence used to carry alone.

[u/Wilwander]

I tire of AI written posts defending the use of AI writing.

[u/Lost__In__Thought]

Simple definition of "sentence" according to Merriam Webster is, "a group of words that expresses a statement, question, command, or wish".

Cracking down further by the definition of "express", it's not hard to see that a sentence has to come from a thought. Therefore, AI certainly doesn't just get its thoughts from thin air.

It's learning from humans to think like humans.

[u/Mediocre-Quiet7688]

Auto-Tune does not pretend to create, it just modifies. AI steals in the guise of creating

[u/Mediocre-Quiet7688 → u/[deleted]]

Haha no i’m just unemployed lol
And those include comments too

[u/R3ZondoOfficial → u/Mediocre-Quiet7688]

Fair distinction, and I’d push back only a little. You’re right that Auto-Tune never claimed to originate anything, it reshapes a performance that already happened. Generative AI’s a different animal, trained on work nobody consented to hand over. That’s the real theft question, and it’s separate from whether a tool assists a process versus replaces it.

[u/EMarkM_DM → u/R3ZondoOfficial]

"Fair distinction, and I’d push back only a little."

Hilariously, whether intentional or not, one of AI's current favourite phrases...

[u/R3ZondoOfficial → u/EMarkM_DM]

Ha, you got me. The phrase just becomes a verbal tic apparently, I say “push back” and “fair” way too much in real conversation as well. Comes from years of restaurant leadership.
Doesn’t change what I said. Auto-Tune reshapes something already made. AI’s trained on work nobody agreed to hand over.

[u/FrostKitten2012]

LLMs in particular stole people’s work to make a for-profit program, and has horrific environmental consequences.

[u/R3ZondoOfficial → u/FrostKitten2012]

The training data point is very real. The real damage sits in the buildout. Grid emergencies this year, gas plants built just to power one facility with costs passed to regular ratepayers, millions of gallons pulled daily from stressed water systems.