Digging an Oil Well. Only to Celebrate Finding Water

I was thinking about this earlier, and a strange analogy came to mind that I remember hearing as a kid. "Your digging an oil well to find water."

Imagine you're an oil driller.

You spend weeks planning, invest time and money, position the rig, and finally start drilling. Everyone around you knows you're searching for oil.

Then one day you hit water.

Now, finding water isn't a bad thing. In the right situation, it's incredibly valuable. But if your goal was oil, you missed the target.

Lately, that's how some AI content I am seeing feels to me.

I see a lot of posts that are obviously AI-generated with very little to no editing at all. Even more common are the same ideas being recycled over and over, just with slightly different wording. The post exists... but it doesn't really say anything new.

Sure, it's content.

But was just generating content the goal?

Or was the goal to create something people actually wanted to read?

AI is an incredible drilling machine. It can dig faster than any of us ever could. But it doesn't decide where to drill, what matters, or whether what it found is actually valuable.

That's still our job.

I use AI every single day, and I wouldn't want to work without it now. But almost everything I publish with the exception of my images gets edited, expanded, rearranged, or rewritten. I add my experiences, my mistakes, my opinions, and sometimes I throw entire sections away because they just don't sound like me.

I recently published a post called: How To Write With AI Without Editing

Many missed the point. Some got it instantly. If you have not see it, then read it.

What I am saying here is I wasted plenty of time using raw AI myself and learned my lesson. Now I speak out about it to help others avoid the mistake I made.

Now AI gives me a starting point to build upon.

The finished article is mine because I have added a part of myself to it.

Maybe that's the difference between producing content and creating something worth remembering.

Just because you found water doesn't mean you struck oil.

What do you think? Are we starting to confuse generating content with creating content?