AI is making our screen time more solitary. People are pushing back.

Key points

• Shared cultural experiences, such as watching a film in a packed cinema, are increasingly rare as AI-driven platforms serve each person a personalised feed.
• Opinion writers and social researchers, including a columnist at The Guardian, argue this shift is narrowing the common references people use to connect with one another.
• The trend is not about technology being bad in general, but about one specific function: automated personalisation that replaces shared stories with individual ones.
• No regulation or single product announcement drives this story; it is a cultural argument gathering momentum.

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Christopher Nolan's latest film, The Odyssey, is still drawing full houses months into its run. One writer's account of watching it, choc-top ice-cream in hand, surrounded by a cinema full of strangers falling quiet together, became a small argument for something large.

That argument: the experience of sharing the same cultural moment with other people, people you have never met and may never see again, is genuinely worth protecting. And AI-powered personalisation, the technology that decides which videos, articles, and music each person sees based on their individual habits, is quietly eating away at it.

What does AI personalisation actually do?

Every major streaming service, social media feed, and news app now uses recommendation algorithms, software that watches what you click, how long you pause, what you skip, and then serves you more of the same. The goal is to keep you engaged. The side effect is that two people in the same household can spend an evening on the same platform and encounter almost nothing in common.

This is not a flaw. It is the product working as designed.

Over time, when everyone's feed is different, fewer people share a reference point. The cultural shorthand that lets a nurse and a shop owner bond over the same film, song, or news story becomes harder to find.

Should ordinary people care?

Yes, and not in an abstract way. Shared stories are one of the quieter mechanisms through which communities hold together. They give strangers something to start a conversation with. They help people feel they are living through the same moment, even when their daily lives are very different.

Researchers who study social cohesion, the glue that holds neighbourhoods and workplaces together, have flagged personalisation as one of several forces fraying that glue.

None of this means deleting your streaming apps. It does mean the choice to go to a cinema, attend a live event, or read a widely shared book is doing more social work than it might appear.

What happens next?

Right now this is a cultural conversation, not a policy fight. No regulator has proposed rules on how personalised a feed may be. No major platform has announced changes.

But the conversation is getting louder. Academics, journalists, and a number of technologists who helped build these systems are now making the case publicly that full personalisation carries a cost that users never agreed to pay.

The simplest response available to anyone today is also the oldest: go somewhere with other people and experience something together.

Common questions

Is AI personalisation illegal or being banned anywhere?

No. Recommendation algorithms are legal everywhere and face no current ban. Some regulators in the European Union are examining algorithmic transparency, meaning platforms may eventually have to explain how their systems work, but no restrictions on personalisation itself are in force.

Can I turn off personalisation on streaming services?

Most platforms offer limited controls, such as clearing your watch history or choosing a genre manually, but full opt-out is rarely available. Browsing in a private or incognito window sometimes resets recommendations to a generic default.

Does going to the cinema actually make a difference?

For the individual experience, yes. A cinema shows every audience member the same film at the same time, which is precisely what a personalised feed cannot replicate. Whether that scales into broader social change depends on how many people make the same choice.