Plastic Burnout: Self-exploitation and the AI Selfie
Thoughts On The ChatGPT Barbiedoll Trend
Recently (April 25), people have been using AI prompts and ChatGPT’s new image feature to post images of themselves styled as 80s-era action figures, complete with retro packaging and accessories that reflect their jobs or identities. It is a trend that will blow over shortly, but it is interesting to write about none-the-less.
The “ChatGPT Barbiedoll” trend, as it’s being called, may disappear fast. But its cultural resonance—and strategic implications—will linger.
This isn’t just another viral moment. It’s a compelling signal of how AI, branding, and self-presentation are converging in increasingly uncanny ways. And for strategists and marketers, it’s worth unpacking.
Dubbed the “ChatGPT Barbiedoll” trend by the press, it’s being hailed as a zombie-like resurrection of Barbiecore. But there’s more going on here than aesthetic nostalgia. For strategists and brands, this fleeting moment offers deeper insight into how people perform identity in the digital age—and what it reveals about work, selfhood, and AI.
Beyond Barbiecore: From Aspiration to Reduction
Barbiecore is about a specific kind of dopamine driven, hot-pink aesthetic that has floated around since the early 2000s. It's a ‘Barbie-esque’ look that has found its way onto catwalks (such as the Moschino Ready-to-Wear show at the 2014 Milan Fashion Week) and red carpets ever since.
In contrast the current trend isn’t about what people are wearing, or the celebration of an uncomplicated and fun aesthetic, instead it’s about what people are doing with their identities.
If there is any connection to Barbie here, then it is more about borrowing from the idea of the doll itself. Barbie’s distorted and troublingly approximate adult-shaped body gained wild success by, in the words of their inventor Ruth Handler, encouraging little girls to:
“reflect their dreams of the future through their play with these adult… dolls”
— M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie
Specifically it was about imagining a future career and the accessories that come with it, implanting the logic of a particular capitalist paradigm and the rewards it promised. In the current trend, however, there is no future being imagined and no rewards being promised.
There is no real exploration going on here, no deep reimagining of possibilities or engagement with the future.
A few days in and there are now certainly plenty of examples of people mocking or bucking the trend, but the general message seems to still be that it provides, in the words of one user on LinkedIn:
“Nice, fun, creative ways of 'meet the team' - the possibilities are limited to your imagination.”
Ultimately this trend has found itself a home on LinkedIn precisely because it so neatly fits with the ethos of the platform: “Here’s me and the tools of my trade: pre-packaged, entirely confected, mass-produced, and ready for purchase!”
It is this casual insouciance about one’s own commodification that sends a shiver up the spine. It’s a chipper little man made of plastic, cute hammer in hand, cheerfully nailing shut the coffin of self as something intrinsically valuable.
Self-Commodification and The Burnout Society
Satirical re-imaginings to one side, at its core the trend is an uncritical and enthusiastic embrace of the logic of late market capitalism where, as Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han puts it in his book ‘The Burnout Society’:
“Exploiting oneself is more efficient than being exploited by someone else because it is accompanied by a feeling of freedom.”
—Byung-Chul Han ‘The Burnout Society’
In other words the cheeriness of it all is where the horror lies.
Indeed ‘The Burnout Society’ can be read as a critique of precisely this kind of self-commodification. Drawing on French philosopher Michel Foucault’s notion of a self-optimizing entrepreneur, ‘homo œconomicus’ who is not simply an entrepreneur of products and services but “an entrepreneur of himself”1 - Han argues that this idea has infiltrated every aspect of our private lives, leading to a world of self-exploitation, psychological breakdown, and burnout.
From this perspective, the ChatGPT Barbie doll trend is not about creativity; it is another marker in the ground that demonstrates not just the relentless commodification of our lives, but how willingly we now embrace the process as natural, or even fun.
Let us be clear: not all digital interaction is negative, nor is all digital self-expression a form of entrapment. Whilst it is certainly the case that AI not only emerges from, but lends itself to, a particular form of late capitalism that condition is not set in stone. Instead it is the sense of inevitability itself, represented by the ChatGPT dolls, that demands our critical engagement.
From Corporate Dolls to Humane AI
If the problem is our too-easy accommodation to this system, what might resistance look like? What if there was a better route toward working with AI that was less about people being dependent on AI and more about humans and AI working together as active, co-productive agents?
This user agency in AI begins with transparency, understanding not just what models do, but how they are designed.
Digital rights organisations such as The Algorithmic Justice League are doing important work in educating the public, sharing practical resources and holding AI developers to account. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s recent work to unpack the so-called “black box” of AI reasoning of their own model, shows promising steps in understanding how AI systems move from one step to the next. It’s the difference between getting an answer and being able to follow the logic behind it.
This matters because interpretability opens the door to contesting and influencing outcomes. If users can see why a model generated a certain output, they’re better positioned to question it, refine it, or intervene. This direct influence is what Javed Khan, Lykourentzou et al. argue for in their review of the literature on AI Human interaction when they talk about:
“allowing users to modify the algorithm design parameters to practice complete agency over AI decision-making.”
— Javed Khen, et al, From Explainable to Interactive AI
Open source solutions such as those offered by Hugging Face are a step in that direction, offering spaces where users can inspect how models are built, modify them, and even remix their functions. It’s a move from passive consumption to co-authorship.
Conclusion
Like all trend’s before it, The ChatGPT Barbie doll trend is fleeting; it will be gone in a week. What it will leave in its wake is a lasting signal of something deeper: the sheer chirpiness with which we post pictures of our own entrapment. It’s a signal of what AI can do to us if left purely in the hands of corporate interests, not freeing us to express our creative essence, but penetrating into ever deeper and more private layers. Stripping away the qualities of creativity, empathy and curiosity that give us intrinsic value as human beings.
We cannot turn back the clock on AI, nor should we wish to. Its most negative outcomes are not the most inevitable ones.
Perhaps there are elements of humanity, our capacity for wonder and ignorance, that AI cannot parse and simply doing what we can to protect and nurture this side of ourselves might be enough. But relying on this on its own would be a retreat to an uncertain redoubt.
The alternative is to lean into the process and demand that we become more than passive users of AI technologies, insisting on transparency in how these technologies function and genuine control over how they operate. Ultimately, our challenge is to transform this inevitable encroachment into an opportunity to reassert our creative autonomy and intrinsic worth, even as we navigate a landscape increasingly defined by digital commodification.
Foucault, M. (2008) The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Edited by M. Senellart. Translated by G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.