Room temperature

Left alone, a cup of coffee will gradually cool until it reaches room temperature.

Stable systems regress to the mean. Things level out on their way to average, which maintains the stability of the system.

The same pressures are put on any individual in our culture.

Sooner or later, unless you push back, you’ll end up at room temperature.

(As I write this, the built-in grammar tool has made suggestions to every single sentence, pushing to make it sound less like me and more like normal.)

blog post by Seth Godin, published Jan. 10, 2026


The above post applies to generative AI in many ways. It also applies to you and me, I suppose, since the last thing we want to end up is "room temperature."

AI, like spell check and grammar check, depends upon lots of rules and lots of previously published material. For now, at least, anything these program produce is based on a predictive model, with results matching what is "expected." They can surprise you, of course, but the robots are not yet creative.

That parenthetical comment Godin makes to end the post is a good reminder that "sounding normal" can often NOT be "sounding like me."

I often remind students that the purpose of education is to make us more different, not make us more the same. 

As we use AI as a tool in this course, it is a good idea to occasionally stop and ask yourself if what you are writing sounds like you. After all, that is what the world wants from you. It already has plenty of "normal."

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