Waiting on the tarmac at Sydney airport recently, I saw a LinkedIn post about a new video technology promising to be ‘The AI of Netflix’. With this new technology, people can now take greater control over the TV they watch. With this new technology, they can do anything from inserting themselves into existing TV shows, dictating the plot of the shows they are currently watching, or even change the ending of a show if the ending was not the one they wanted. People can now upload themselves into the platform, upload their actual house, or workplace, and see themselves in the show of their own lives.
And this idea is both intriguing and absolutely grotesque, writes David Coupland, co-founder and strategy director of Born.
This is surely the new zenith, the final boss, of self interest and self reverence.
And so sitting on the tarmac, sighing heavily about the surreality of the world right now, it occurred to me that in an age defined by astonishing technology, algorithms, filters, and auto-generated affirmations, we are witnessing a very peculiar cultural shift. We are living in a time where the notion of ‘solipsism’ is being replaced by the reality of ‘slopsism’. Solipsism, the philosophical notion that only one’s own mind is sure to exist – that we are the main character in the movie of our lives – is no longer a distant academic theory. It’s being transformed, mutated, and rebranded by technology into something more diluted, more chaotic, and more sinister: slopsism.
What is Slopsism?
If solipsism is a belief, slopsism is a behaviour. Slopsism is the messy, compulsive tendency to churn out highly personalised, self-referential content: endlessly, publicly, and with little regard for context, audience, or (importantly) artistic merit. It is the by-product of a world where every individual is not just encouraged, but expected, to be a brand; a creator; a one-person production studio. And the tools—powered by AI—enable this performance at an astonishing scale and speed. The result? A cultural landscape drowning in low-effort self-expression masquerading as insight. And of course this is what’s happening, we are all being given the opportunity to validate our own thoughts as ‘interesting’, and so we are taking it.
The rise of the narcissism engine
While it is clear (and boring to say) that AI has democratised content creation, we need to acknowledge that this is both a triumph and a trap. Never before has it been easier to turn thoughts into posts, selfies into aesthetic narratives, memories into monetised memoirs. Tools like automated journaling apps, personal GPT clones, and real-time image stylisers turn every feeling into a feeling like a ‘finished product’. Every minor inconvenience becomes a parable. Every moment of introspection becomes akin to a sermon. The technology doesn’t just allow this, it actively, ferociously encourages it. Algorithms reward frequency, emotion, and the illusion of authenticity. And then the quieter voices—the curious ones, the questioning ones—are drowned out. In their place, we get slopsist volume.
Slopsism is the content you scroll past without remembering. It is the daily deluge of reels, vlogs, AI-generated diary entries, and trauma-dumps, each one demanding validation for simply existing, but few offering anything beyond the scope of self. And this, reader, is BAD. Really, really bad.
The collapse of perspective
Art was once a way to interpret the outside world. Great works of literature, film, painting, and music sought to translate the complexity of life beyond the artist: nature, society, politics, other people. The artist stood at a threshold between the internal and the external, filtering experience through an interpretive lens that aimed to connect. Even commercial art was pursued and practised through this lens.
Slopsism, however, reverses this dynamic. Now, the act of expression often starts and ends with the self. The world is reduced to a mirror. Everything outside is relevant only as it reflects inward. Travel becomes a selfie opportunity. Or a post-modern critique of the selfie opportunity (my least favourite). Relationships become content arcs. Even suffering becomes a form of branded currency. This internal focus doesn’t lead to depth, it leads to myopia. When your own perspective is the only one you truly trust, curiosity dies. Empathy shrinks. The connective thread of shared human experience frays.
From reflection to performance
The tragedy of slopsism is that it confuses exposure with expression. It prioritises immediacy over meaning. We perform ourselves, again and again, not to understand who we are but to be seen doing so. The audience is algorithmic. The feedback is empty.
The soul—once the source of art, and IMHO the last enduring chance humanity has—is outsourced to convenience. And yet, not every experience is interesting. Of course it fucking isn’t. Not every perception deserves a platform. There is no inherent value in expressing something simply because it happened to you.
We are all now living out that teenage experience of listening to music while looking out a window of a moving train and thinking “this could be a music video”. No. It. Can’t. Meaning is created when our personal narratives intersect with the world around us, when we move from ego to ecology.
Resisting the slop
To resist slopsism is not to reject technology or silence expression. It is to return to intent. It is to ask: Who is this for? What does it offer beyond myself? What can I show you about the world, not just about me?
‘We’ do not matter in isolation. We exist in relation to the world. AI can be a tool of connection or a mirror of isolation. The choice lies in how we use it. We must stop mistaking output for insight, and instead seek expression that reaches out, beyond the bounds of our experience, toward something shared. Slopsism is easy. It is everywhere. But meaning, now more than ever, requires effort, and a willingness to look outward.
From system to symptom
Adam Ferrier recently described AI as “a better teacher than many teachers… a better creative than many creatives” and warned we might be “being hoodwinked” into a behavioural-era mindset when the stakes are existential. I share the concern about being hoodwinked, but I’d argue that in some ways, we’ve already been living inside that mindset for years. AI isn’t creating it; it’s just turning up the volume.
When AI is used as self‑mirroring fuel, it risks affirming the individual not through depth, but through automation. And that, to me, is part of a much broader industry playbook: one where brands are encouraged to act first and think later, where creative value is defined by provocation over perspective, and where efficiency often trumps empathy. In this climate, craft erodes, cultural context gets flattened, and “slopsism” flourishes.
So while AI might present as an existential threat, it’s also a highly efficient amplifier of patterns we’ve already built, patterns that reward volume over voice, iteration over insight, and noise over narrative. That’s the part I think we should name and question.
At Born, we try to push against this drift. We build our AI tools, BornLabs, with narrative over noise as a guiding principle. Where slopsism fixates on momentary visibility, we focus on enduring resonance. Stories, at their core, aren’t about you. They’re about what you reveal to others through your perspective on the world. Rather than chasing clicks through endless churn, we help construct coherent narratives that evolve, adapt, and stay meaningful over time.
Brands need to be disciplined now more than ever: ensuring every expression has purpose and context, that every campaign fits into a broader whole, and most importantly, that they reconnect with audiences, not just algorithms. Don’t let the algorithms win. Let’s not lose sight of perspective and meaning. Let’s not get sloppy. Let’s not usher in the dawn of slopsism. We are simply not that interesting. Anyway, that’s what I think, and that’s important.
