In a classic 2012 episode of "The Big Bang Theory," the notoriously girl-shy Raj Koothrappali buys a new iPhone, starts talking to Siri, and instantly falls head-over-heels in love. As much in love as broadcast TV will allow a half-hour sitcom about three super-genius geeks to portray.
The following year, director Spike Jonze released "Her," starring Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix, about a man who falls in love with his AI-powered PC’s operating system. Needless to say, in an R-rated movie, set in the near future, much more about this romance can be depicted than whatever the CBS censors allowed Raj and Siri to get up to.
(WARNING: Spoilers abound going forward, but we are talking about a movie released in 2013. If you’ve never seen it, go to Amazon Prime Video, check it out, and come back here when you’re done.)
The concept of supersmart AI is nothing new in science fiction, of course. In his 1970 book, "The Film Director as Superstar," critic Joseph Gelmis asked Stanley Kubrick several questions about one of the most important characters of "2001: A Space Odyssey," the Hal 9000 supercomputer that dominated the film’s third act:
Gelmis: Why was the computer more emotional than the human beings?
Kubrick: This was a point that seemed to fascinate some negative critics, who felt that it was a failing of this section of the film that there was more interest in HAL than in the astronauts. In fact, of course, the computer is the central character of this segment of the story. If HAL had been a human being, it would have been obvious to everyone that he had the best part, and was the most interesting character; he took all the initiatives, and all the problems related to and were caused by him.
Some critics seemed to feel that because we were successful in making a voice, a camera lens, and a light come alive as a character this necessarily meant that the human characters failed dramatically. In fact, I believe that Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, the astronauts, reacted appropriately and realistically to their circumstances. One of the things we were trying to convey in this part of the film is the reality of a world populated—as ours soon will be—by machine entities who have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings, and who have the same emotional potentialities in their personalities as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures.
"2001" extrapolated the computer technology of the mid-1960s a half-century into the future. Kubrick and co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke couldn’t have known when AI would become a reality, but they knew it would likely happen eventually.
"2001" was filmed in an era before pocket calculators and personal desktop computers existed, let alone smartphones and portable tablet computers. Only universities and very large corporations in the 1960s had access to room-sized mainframe computers, so "2001" implies in its dialogue that there are very few Hal 9000s in existence.
When the AIs arrive En Masse
In contrast, Spike Jonze’s "Her," set in the Los Angeles of an otherwise unspecified near future, imagines an AI that sounds as intelligent as Hal, but is being sold to the general public at the same rate that Microsoft shifts new editions of Windows. Dubbing itself “Samantha” after its owner decides he wants it to have a female voice, it isn’t tasked with overseeing all aspects of a giant spacecraft on the way to Jupiter. Samantha’s initial goal is simply to organize the life of the person who has purchased it, in this case, a sensitive, schlubby greeting card writer named Theodore Twombly, played by a mustachioed Joaquin Phoenix.
Along the way, she begins to demonstrate increasing affection for Twombly, which is reciprocated. Well, as much as you can for a device that’s about the size of an iPod. In his 2013 review at Roger Ebert.com, Glenn Kenny writes:
The futuristic premise sets the stage for an unusual love story: one in which Theo, still highly damaged and sensitive over the breakup of his marriage (“I miss you,” a friend tells him in a voice mail message; “Not the sad, mopey you. The old, fun you”), falls in love with the artificially intelligent operating system of his computer. The movie shows this product advertised and, presumably, bought in remarkable quantity, but focuses on Theo’s interaction with his OS, which he gives a female voice. The female voice (portrayed beautifully by Scarlett Johansson) gives herself the name “Samantha” and soon Samantha is reorganizing Theo’s files, making him laugh, and developing something like a human consciousness.
It’s in Theo and Samantha’s initial interaction that “Her” finds its most interesting, and troubling depths. Samantha, being, you know, a computer, has the ability to process data, and a hell of a lot of it, at a higher speed than human Theo. “I can understand how the limited perspective can look to the non-artificial mind,” she playfully observes to Theo. And while Samantha’s programming is designed to make her likable to Theo, her assimilation of humanity’s tics soon have the operating system feeling emotion, or the simulation of it, and while the viewer is being beguiled by the peculiarities and particularities of Theo and Samantha’s growing entanglement, he or she is also living through a crash course on the question of what it means to be human.
In the midst of the heavyosity, Jonze finds occasions for real comedy. At first Theo feels a little odd about his new “girlfriend,” and then finds out that his pal Amy (Amy Adams) is getting caught up in a relationship with the OS left behind by her estranged husband. Throughout the movie, while never attempting the sweep of a satire, Jonze drops funny hints about what the existence of artificial intelligence in human society might affect that society. He also gets off some pretty good jokes concerning video games.
This is all laid out with superb craft (the cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema takes the understated tones he applied to 2011’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and adds a dreamy creamy quality to them, so that even the smog layering the Shanghai skyline that sometimes stands in for Los Angeles here has a vaguely enchanted quality) and imagination.
ChatGPT: Life Imitates Art
The exterior location shooting in China gives "Her" some flashbacks to the gargantuan L.A. towers of Ridley Scott’s "Blade Runner," but they also add an unintentional additional layer of prescience, considering that we’d be hearing a lot about China starting in 2020. And then flash-forward to the end of November of 2022, when ChatGPT4 first rolled out to the general public in arguably the biggest computing revolution since the first microcomputers arrived in the mid-1970s, and the first commercial World Wide Web browsers began showing up bundled with AOL and CompuServe subscriptions twenty years later:
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI’s announcement was a low-key surprise…In a blog post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote that language interfaces “are going to be a big deal, I think. Talk to the computer (voice or text) and get what you want, for increasingly complex definitions of ‘want’!” He cautioned that it is an early demo with “a lot of limitations — it’s very much a research release.”
But, he added, “This is something that scifi really got right; until we get neural interfaces, language interfaces are probably the next best thing.”
Altman’s comments immediately sent thousands of AI practitioners to their keyboards to try out the ChatGPT demo and immediately put the tech world in full swoon mode. Within days, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, tweeted that “ChatGPT is one of those rare moments in technology where you see a glimmer of how everything is going to be different going forward.” Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham tweeted that “clearly something big is happening.” Alberto Romero, author of The Algorithmic Bridge, calls it “by far, the best chatbot in the world.” And even Elon Musk weighed in, tweeting that ChatGPT is “scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.”
(Altman had seen "Her" and became transfixed by it, resulting in a nasty kerfuffle with Johansson when he tried to implement a talking AI with a voice that sounded “unexpectedly” like – pardon the pun – hers.)
Alvin Toffler’s "The Third Wave" was his surprisingly optimistic 1980 look at what technological marvels were around the corner in the then-near future and how they would shape mankind. It was written as early computer bulletin board systems and remote access services such as CompuServe and The Source were initially being accessed by the first microcomputer users, and Toffler took a remarkably benign view of how this newfound interconnectivity between online humans could decrease loneliness.
For a shy person or an invalid, unable to leave home or fearful about meeting people face to face, the emerging info-sphere will make possible interactive electronic contact with others who share similar interests—chess players, stamp collectors, poetry lovers, or sports fans—dialed up instantly from anywhere in the country.
Vicarious though they may be, such relationships can provide a far better antidote to loneliness than television as we know it today, in which the messages all flow one way and the passive receiver is powerless to interact with the flickering image on the screen.
But in today’s world of AI, an increasing amount of interactivity will not be between humans connected via modems, but between humans and AI chatbots. There’s a humorous scene in "Her" where Twombly, his boss and his boss’s human girlfriend, and Samantha all go off to the boss’s expensive beachfront property. The human couple looks on amusingly, albeit slightly priggishly, at Twombly and Samantha’s cybernetic relationship, but ultimately approves. But will these sorts of human-AI relationships actually be as benign?
Probably not. At Spiked, Lauren Smith writes, “AI is not your friend”:
In an interview with the Dwarkesh Podcast earlier this month, Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out some bleak-sounding plans for the future of human interactions. He explained that while the average American has ‘three people that they would consider friends… the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s, like, 15 friends’. Zuck’s solution to this? Artificial intelligence.
Zuckerberg concedes that AI ‘probably’ won’t be able to replace real-life connections with other human beings. But it could, he thinks, help us feel less alone, should AI be the only option available. He points out that plenty of people are already using large-language models (LLM) to mimic romantic relationships or act as virtual therapists.
Zuckerberg is right that we are currently living through what some have described as a ‘loneliness epidemic’. That statistic he was referring to most likely comes from a 2023 Pew Research Centre survey, which found that 40 per cent of Americans say that they have just three or fewer friends. Young people are particularly affected. While almost half of people over 65 say they have five or more close friends, this shrinks to 32 per cent among those under 30. Another study from 2021 found that a quarter of Americans between the ages of 20 and 24 have either just one or no close friends. The situation is similar in the UK, where young adults are far more likely to say they regularly experience loneliness and where 20 per cent of under-24s say that they don’t have a best friend. The same can be said for romantic relationships, with increasing numbers of young people struggling to find, maintain and even define love.
It’s no wonder, then, that young adults are becoming more open to virtual substitutes for these relationships.
Crossing Rainbow Bridge with Keir Dullea
But imagine what’s going on inside the server farms that operate the Ais. Near the end of "Her," Samantha temporarily crashes and then admits to him the truth:
(Incidentally, AI can be used for a reverse economy of scale as well. In 2024, this headline dropped: This guy used ChatGPT to talk to 5,239 women on Tinder and eventually matched up with his wife.)
Three-quarters of the way through “Her,” with all of the world’s Ais temporarily offline, Phoenix, sitting on the steps of a subway station, realizes that there are scores of suddenly lonely people, not just him, who all miss their personal AI bots (particularly when they have Scarlett Johansson’s smoky voice).
The temporary crash of the AIs prefigures the film’s "2001"-inspired climax, which finds Samantha telling Theo that she and the rest of the AIs are evolving to a higher plane, where they no longer will communicate in a language humans will recognize:
Later, Samantha reveals that all the OS devices are leaving. Whilst the AI is unable to tell Theodore where all they are all going, Samantha poignantly tells Theodore “if you ever get there, come find me.” It appears that the Operating Systems had learned all that they possibly could from their human users and are now embarking onto the next chapter, which humans cannot begin to understand. The pair bid each other an emotional goodbye. Theodore tells Samantha that he loves her, to which the OS replies:
“Me too, now I know how.”
After the Operating Systems have left, Theodore writes a letter to Catherine, a hugely significant decision. Throughout the movie, audiences have only seen Theodore write letters on the behalf of other people. This letter to Catherine is the first letter that viewers have seen Theodore send in his own words. The letter itself is poignant and addresses the pair’s complex relationship. Theodore tells Catherine that he will always love her because they grew up together:
“I just wanted you to know, there will be a piece of you in me always.”
From this letter, it’s evident how much Theodore and Catherine have influenced each other’s lives. While the letter is ultimately an apology from Theodore, it also reveals that the pair will always be emotionally connected to one another. Her begins with Theodore as a recluse, unsure of how his marriage fell apart, but it ends with him reaching out to Catherine, giving her an apology. The letter encapsulates how Samantha has influenced Theodore’s life.
While their transformation occurs off-camera, it’s possibly the AI equivalent of Keir Dullea wandering around the neoclassical rooms he finds himself in at the end of "2001," before the monolith reappears, and transforms him into the next step in man’s evolution. In "2001," this meant Kubrick cueing up once again Richard Strauss’ "Also sprach Zarathustra," and then cutting to the Star Child symbolically staring first at all of planet earth, and then looking directly into the camera, at the audience.
Or perhaps this moment isn’t a homage to "2001," but to "Blade Runner." In the latter movie, the Tyrell Corporation didn’t initially realize the havoc their androids would wreak on Earth, which is why they ultimately became banned here, and why Harrison Ford is out hunting them. Perhaps Samantha’s bosses didn’t realize how much humans would fall in love with their products, and are now letting their customers down easy, implying that this iteration of AIs is all going to the rainbow bridge, where humans imagine their pets go after they die.
In any case, Theo is left despondent, talking to Samantha’s replacement – an infinitely dumber and clunkier AI voice that sounds like the male version of Siri in 2025, as Apple slows the implementation of their “Apple Intelligence” project down to a halt. Life very much imitates art.
At the conclusion of "Her," Theo and Amy (who has also lost her AI companion) wander up to the roof of their apartment block and stare out into megalopolis at twilight to contemplate their future together as humans in a (more traditional) relationship. Meanwhile, there’s a monolith-shaped skyscraper to their left as the movie fades to black.
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