October 21, 2025
After a week of SXSW Sydney, three words echoed across almost every session I attended.
AI. Authenticity. Community.
They weren’t just buzzwords. They felt like the foundations of a cultural recalibration.
We’ve spent the better part of a decade chasing hyper-personalisation, an algorithmic arms race where everything needed to be “for me.”
Every click, every campaign, every curated feed taught us that individuality was the ultimate prize. And yet, somewhere along the way, we lost something bigger: each other.
Georgia Hack from L’Oreal Groupe Australia & New Zealand captured it perfectly: “The world is moving to become more private than social.”
We’ve retreated into digital silos where privacy is the new power, attention is currency and connection is conditional.
But beneath that withdrawal, there’s a countercurrent forming. A quiet cultural swing back toward shared purpose, place and planet.
The optimism came not from the tech itself but from how we might use it to rebuild trust, intimacy and belonging.
AI wasn’t framed as a threat to creativity; it was reframed as a creative amplifier.
Ndidi Oteh of Accenture Song said it best: “A tool has never reduced our ability to provide inclusion; it’s a human decision.”
The problem has never been the tool. It’s how we wield it; or ignore what it amplifies in us.
What struck me this year was the emerging desire for collective creativity. Annaliese Norman from Mastercard spoke about co-creation as a bridge to subcultures: “Co-Creation helps to go beyond a brief and find a solution that is otherwise impossible without the deep knowledge of sub-cultures.”
In a world where people are tired of being ‘targeted,’ co-creation feels like the antidote. Not just making for audiences, but with them.
This shift mirrors what we’re seeing in culture at large: a renewed appreciation for the local, the physical and the participatory.
From community-run news outlets to the rise of citizen journalism (as Xavier Muhlebach, Australian Open, pointed out), people are taking ownership of the narratives that shape their world.
Even as they grapple with privacy and monetisation challenges. It’s messy. But it’s real.
Yet, for all its promise, AI has also contributed to a new kind of cultural fatigue.
Everywhere you look, there’s generative content flooding feeds, inboxes and screens; polished, algorithmically optimised but often soulless.
The very tools designed to amplify creativity can create a kind of “slop” that numbs rather than inspires.
It’s this glut of automated perfection that is ironically driving people back to human, in-person experiences.
The coffee shop brainstorm, the local meetup, the festival crowd - spaces where unpredictability, vulnerability and true connection can’t be coded.
The more the digital world churns content at us, the more we crave the slow, messy, uncurated richness of shared, lived experiences.
Of course, the broader backdrop still feels bleak.
As Andrew Davies of B Lab Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand warned, we’re operating in an environment “fundamentally pushing us to do everything that we can to maximise profit in the short term.”
It’s no wonder so much creative work feels defensive rather than daring. We’re optimising for algorithms, not audiences. Chasing metrics, not meaning.
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But there’s an awakening happening, a creative rebellion against the doom-scroll.
Dr Rebecca Huntley summed it up sharply: “The world is overwhelmed with media that’s become a choose-your-own-adventure of content, so it’s become incredibly difficult to craft and tell impactful stories that land.”
We’ve flooded the system.
Now we crave stories that stick. Stories that feel human. Stories that make us believe again.
It hit me that every conversation - whether about AI, storytelling or sustainability - was actually circling the same truth: people are desperate to feel part of something real again.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s where AI becomes the unexpected ally.
The tool that frees us from the grunt work so we can re-focus on empathy, narrative and nuance.
A way to bring more people into the process, not push them out.
If we can use AI to expand creativity rather than compress it, we might just find that elusive “Pandemic of Joy” Adam Posner of The Point of Loyalty called for.
Because the antidote to our fractured world isn’t more personalisation, it’s participation.
It’s building things that people want to belong to, not just consume. It’s remembering that technology doesn’t define humanity; humanity defines technology.
As society at large, and even more so as marketers and brand leaders, that’s our challenge and our opportunity.
To use AI not to automate authenticity, but to amplify it.
To stop chasing the illusion of relevance and start creating the conditions for resonance.
After a week immersed in SXSW, I left with one simple truth: after years of algorithmic self-interest, we’re all finally starting to rediscover the human need for shared meaning.
So, maybe the next creative revolution won’t come from code or content — but from community.
Transforming this sense of creative uncertainty into a movement of collective joy.
