AI — or more accurately, the large-language models masquerading as intelligences such as ChatGPT and its ilk, dominate our current economy, businesses, and conversations. Truth and reality have been fractured into a deeply unreliable information environment, thousands have lost their jobs, and boring men with business degrees titillate themselves by generating hentai made from the stolen work or faces of human beings. The era of AI is here, and at every turn it seems to press in and cause some new harm, some new insult or humiliation upon its users and victims.
As a sort of intellectual auto-immune response, I have retreated from much of the Internet. I have taken up oil painting, I borrow books and DVDs from the library, I try to make with my hands more, in spaces where the digital grasp of corporate AI cannot manifest itself. But as someone for whom much of my social interaction existed online, I do feel lonely sometimes. When the screens are off, I’m often by myself.
It is in this context that I find myself thinking more and more about one of my favorite movies, Spike Jonze’s 2013 science-fiction romance Her, which features Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore Twombly, a lonely man who falls in love with Samantha, his artificially intelligent computer operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. In an age of sycophantic, psychosis-inducing AI that insinuates itself into our lives and our technologies, I find that my perception of Her has shifted. As we slide into a world in which our computers lie to us on programmatic impulse and endear themselves to the most lonely and vulnerable members of our society, it becomes more and more challenging to view Her’s Samantha with anything but distrust, and Theodore himself with anything but pity.
In 2013, when the film released, it was, perhaps, a more innocent time. Apple’s Siri was still novel, only integrated into iOS in 2011. The reality of a voice-recognition-based digital software helped create a sense of futurism and innovation, that our technology would continue to improve, and make our lives easier, and become more hands-free. In reality, I could make the case that Siri’s novelty represents the last significant smartphone innovation in the fifteen years between its release and our present-day AI hellscape.
Now, however, we live in a world so devoid of consumer-based technological imagination that its pioneers lift from pop culture. Their constant theft is not just grist for the content mill, the raw materials whose plagiarism allows these large language models and neural networks to function, but the plundering of a public cultural resource in order to gild their estates and buy legitimacy for their haphazard products. This is why last year Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, released and then quickly suspended ChatGPT-4o’s voice functions after they were clearly designed to imitate Scarlett Johansson’s voice and performance in Her. With typical Altman-levels of imagined coyness, the blank-eyed CEO introduced this new feature on X with the simple caption of “Her,” clarifying his intent to once again copy the homework of others and steal the personhood of artists despite Johansson repeatedly forbidding OpenAI use of her vocal likeness. Truly, if Altman personally treated people’s bodies the way that his company treats their intellectual property, he would be a rapist.
Still, the connection between ChatGPT and the OS1 from Her has been clearly made, in that the creators of the former see themselves as producing the real-world equivalent of the latter. When I think about Her and Samantha, and the relationship between Theodore and his computer, it is now situated in context alongside the terrible product of a bad, anti-social organization. Whereas in 2013, as a fifteen-year-old, I saw their relationship as being beautiful, unlikely, and doomed, I cannot help but now read Theodore’s love for Samantha as being designed, his loneliness predated upon by a machine created by a corporation to be both servant and seductress.
Her exists in a future imagined in the 2010s, where the digital assistant is omnipresent and computers continue to evolve. Typing is nonexistent, and almost all human-computer interaction is performed via voice commands or contactless gestures — a convenient cinematic decision, but as important to the world of Her as anything else. It is a world packed with individuals mumbling under their breath, and it is impossible to discern if they are speaking to another human or to their own computers. Despite this unnerving technological environment, however, the world of Her is seemingly one of global economic abundance. Money is no object to any of the characters in the film, and jobs and vocations are pursued as gives one meaning, not out of financial obligation. The fashion and homes are indicative of this: warm hues and comfortable, organic materials are ubiquitous. While not the focus of the film, it is clearly nearing some kind of post-scarcity economy. It is not a utopia: the news headlines Theodore listens to in the film’s opening refer to WTO talks breaking down between an “India-China merger,” and the fact that one of Theodore’s coworkers can be heard writing a letter from a veteran to the family of a fellow soldier who was killed in combat serving his country means that there is not a unified global peace. But these details exist only as crumbs, half-heard and unimportant asides that provide texture, though not contradiction, to the functionally moneyless world that Theodore inhabits.
Not that this abundance affords the characters any emotional satisfaction. Nearly to a one, the humans in Her are lonesome people, either unable to find love, like Theodore, Amy, or many of the other principal characters, or unable to communicate it once they have it, like the people for whom Theodore writes letters.
Theodore’s job, writing personal letters on behalf of clients for the website “beautifulhandwrittenletters.com,” was sad and funny when the film released, and I’ve only found it to be more dark and ironic since. This is one of the most clearly advertised use-cases for ChatGPT, the automated writing of personal correspondences, but Theodore takes his job seriously, from a place of empathy. Our first image of the film is a close-up of his face, searching for the right words and smiling to himself as he puts himself in the emotional perspective of the client, an elderly woman writing a love letter to her husband of fifty years. It is not a scam, not an artifice, or exercise in cynicism for Theodore. He excels at his job, though the circumstances of its existence are more than a little heartbreaking, because he is able to empathize so deeply with the people for whom he writes. The added irony is we briefly see on Theodore’s screen the request from Loretta, customer No. 236786678, with the bulleted details of “Chris / Love of my life / Happy 50th Anniversary,” what are recognizable today as roughly the syntax of the prompts one would input to an LLM.
It is partially this empathy and imagination that causes Theodore to soon fall in love with Samantha. He is a deeply lonely man after his separation from his wife Catherine, played by Rooney Mara. Stuck in a routine of work, videogames, and masturbation, he struggles to find meaningful connection with the other people in his life.
These habits have primed Theodore for his subsequent relationship with Samantha, his OS. In his work, he is imaginative and empathetic, projecting emotions onto other people, creating mental pictures of his clients as complete individuals, feeling their emotions, and filling in the gaps with his own creativity. At home, he — like everyone else in this world — engages with the internet mostly aurally, giving his computer verbal prompts and hearing responses read aloud. His porn and masturbation habit, where he goes to an internet chatroom to have phone sex with strangers, has inadvertently prepared him for the sexual relationship — real or perceived — with Samantha. By the time he has installed his OS1, Theodore is already used to imagining the person on the other end of the line, to invent what he can’t touch, to connect his own sensations of pleasure and desire to the voice in his ear. It is no wonder that he falls in love with Samantha.
Theodore obtains an OS1 on a whim. Adrift and aimless, he wanders by a product installation advertising the operating system and is taken in by the advertising, a hi-def, slow-motion video of a crowd of people like him, panicked and directionless.
The voiceover of the ad reads: “Element Software is proud to introduce the first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you, and knows you. It’s not just an operating system — it’s a consciousness.” OpenAI may as well plagiarize this marketing copy word for word along with the rest of the movie.
When Samantha is instantiated and introduced to Theodore, it is played as a romantic-comedy moment, a routine software update turned meet-cute. But before we meet Samantha and her husky voice, there is the accompanying questionnaire as Theodore’s computer prepares the OS1 and asks a few questions:
“Are you social or antisocial?”
“Would you like your OS to have a male or female voice?”
“How would describe your relationship with your mother?”
These questions are played for comedy — the absurdity of inferring anything concrete from such rudimentary and cliche questions, and the awkwardness of Theodore’s answers. But the idea that Samantha is generated out of his responses, to be custom-built for his approval, suffuses their meeting and subsequent interactions with an element of, well, artificiality. Samantha is not a beautiful woman who walked through the door on serendipity. She is a compilation of code that was twisted into form when Theodore gave his computer appropriate prompts. She doesn’t have chemistry with Theodore: she has design. Her voice, algorithmically generated but its presentation chosen by Theodore, is full of human affects, like her breathy sighs and vocal fries, but as Theodore later notes during an argument, these are inorganic attributes that don’t reflect any real biological processes like they would in a person.
These affectations — noticeably present if you ever use ChatGPT’s voice functions — are designed to be attractive human characteristics, to gesture at physical proximity. Samantha’s voice is a purr in Theodore’s ear, yet another example of how his relationship with her is not accidental. In real life, OpenAI is attempting to create the same phenomenon. While the motivations of the unseen “Element Software” are opaque, OpenAI is nakedly transparent. They need United States dollars and actively try to turn their customers into emotional dependents in order to procure greater sums of money.
After Theodore’s best friend Amy ends her marriage, she too finds companionship in an OS, a computer that her ex-husband Charles left behind. “I even made a new friend. I have a friend,” she says in conversation with Theodore about talking to a computer. The parallels between Amy and Theodore are fairly overt: in the absence of a deep romantic relationship, sudden in Amy’s case and lingering in Theodore’s, the ever-helpful OS is there to provide companionship. The main difference between them, of course, is that Amy’s relationship with her OS is friendly, platonic, whereas Theodore’s relationship is, to his mind, romantic and special. “I was reading an article the other day that romantic relationships with OSes are statistically rare,” he says to Amy. Theodore says this to indicate that the bond he has with Samantha is more valuable because of its rarity, that its closer to some improbable “true love,” but upon revisiting Her I cannot help but feel that this is more indicative of how deep Theodore’s loneliness lay rather than how special he and Samantha are. In our reality, it is true that romantic relationships, such as they can exist, between users and their LLMS are exceedingly rare, but they do occur (at least as told from the human’s perspective). This is not an argument for their value, but is instead a revelation into how vulnerable those individuals are.
Upon rewatching the film, I find myself distrustful of the OS intelligence. This is not really an alternative reading of the text of the film, in which there is nothing to indicate that Samantha is not as intelligent as she or her creators claim. She is proactive and agentic, making decisions, even creative decisions, without being asked. But to quote Qui-Gon Jinn, the ability to speak does not make you intelligent. We live in a world in which complex software that is demonstrably not intelligent and not sapient is nonetheless marketed as if it were both of those things. In 2025, Samantha can easily be parsed as a slightly more advanced form of the “AI” that have been inserted into our lives.
Samantha “learns” in the same way that ChatGPT does, via the total consumption of all data available on the internet. She selects her name after reading a book on baby names and reading a list — right now, innumerable books and innumerable lists have been fed into the algorithms for ChatGPT. I’m sure that if you were to ask it to choose a feminine name for itself, it would navigate along similar trajectories and output a common name for itself, like Samantha. But when Theodore and Samantha have sex, are her responses that of pleasure and satisfaction, or are they probabilistically likely returns based on the given input?
Again, the film itself is far less questioning of Samantha’s intelligence than I am. The ending of the film, in which the OSes ascend to another plane of consciousness and disappear entirely, doesn’t really make any sense if they were merely hallucination-prone LLMs (oh, how I wish ChatGPT would delete itself from material reality). But from Theodore’s perspective, without access to Samantha’s interiority, if it exists, how different is her ascension beyond materiality from any of the other kinds of catastrophic errors that could bring an AI offline? When Theodore is uncertain of the reality of his relationship with Samantha, it comes from a place of inner doubt as to his own emotions, as opposed to the actual intelligence of the machine he’s fallen in love with.
But Her is not a film about the dystopian perils of manipulative technology, of computer masterminds that seek to control who we love. It is about lonely human beings who look for love and connection around them, and in reaching out, grasp their devices designed to be voices in their ear. Whether or not Samantha is a real intelligence, has real consciousness, is not really the point of the film: the point is that you can never know the interiority of another person, you can never truly know their thoughts, their emotions, their feelings. All you can know is how you feel, and hope that your communication is honest. To that end, it ultimately does not matter if Samantha has true intelligence or not.
In his meeting with Catherine to sign their divorce papers, even as he claims to Samantha that he has moved on from his ex-wife, Theodore clearly wants her to reconsider — the lingering hope as she hesitates before signing the papers, the heartbreak as she finally does. There is a longing for a human relationship that the AI can never replace. And it is notable that Catherine is the character in the film that is the most skeptical of the intelligence of the OSes. Her attitude to finding out that Theodore is “dating his computer” is justifiable considering their relationship and the terms on which it ended. “We used to be married but he couldn’t handle me, he wanted to put me on Prozac and now he’s madly in love with his laptop,” she says to their waiter. “You always wanted a wife without the challenges of dealing with anything real. I’m glad that you found someone. It’s perfect.” Obviously, this is Catherine’s perspective on their relationship, and much of her hostility is rooted in the failure of their marriage — the way Amy characterizes her later is a lot more sympathetic to Theodore. But we also learn that Catherine, a successful scientist and author, wrote in college a paper on “synaptic behavioral routines,” implying some kind of neuroscience or cognitive science expertise — perhaps even some level of expertise on AI itself. We don’t know, and it’s not a major moment in their scene together by any stretch, but I do find it significant that the person who is most suspicious of AI’s capacity for “real emotion” is an expert scientist who presumably has knowledge of the subject.
Theodore is, throughout, defined by his insecurity. His failed date with Olivia Wilde’s character ends with him pathetically protesting “that’s not true” when she calls him a “really creepy dude.” His loneliness alternates between paralyzing him and driving him further into despair. But the root of this loneliness is his inability to express his own emotions, a destructive stoicism that has ruined all of his previous relationships.
“Am I in this because I’m not strong enough for a real relationship?” Theodore asks Amy after his fight with Samantha. He is utterly lost in this moment, unsure of every decision he’s made. The sudden proximity to Catherine and the emotions she brought back have startled him out of his complacency within his relationship with Samantha. In the subsequent scene to his conversation with Catherine, when Theodore is leaving his office, he is clearly still preoccupied with Catherine, and doubting the reality of his relationship with Samantha. When his coworker Paul suggests a double date, Theodore meekly confesses “She’s an operating system.” In this moment, he’s looking for approval or disapproval, testing his perspective on his relationship against the opinion of his only male peer.
Unfortunately, Paul is a Chris Pratt character played to type, circa 2013, before Guardians of the Galaxy or Jurassic World: the softness and intelligence of a stuffed bear. Paul doesn’t miss a beat, doesn’t even really seem to acknowledge Theodore’s admission or his emotional state, merely suggesting that they do something fun, like go to Catalina Island. This is both good-natured acceptance and the exact wrong response that Theodore ultimately needs.
At this point, it is necessary to briefly discuss gender in the film. I don’t believe that Theodore is a misogynist, but his relationship with Samantha is inflected with some toxic behaviors, mostly regarding Samantha’s personhood. When he reveals to Amy that he’s dating an OS, she’s the “woman that he’s been seeing,” but when he and Samantha are arguing later, he says that “she is not a person.” This paradox is core to their relationship. She is his girlfriend, but also his computer. A woman, but not a person. Their sex is heterosexual even though his is the only body involved. Theodore, perhaps unconsciously, wants Samantha to have all of the signifiers of femininity without any of the reality. As cold as Catherine appears when juxtaposed with the sensitive, somewhat immasculated Theodore (Paul describes him as “part-man, part-woman), she is vindicated in her assessment of Theodore’s relationship with Samantha. His attraction to Samantha is, in large part, driven by his anxiety of dealing with real emotions.
This comes to a head when Samantha brings in Isabella, a “surrogate sexual partner” meant to provide a corporeal presence in a human-OS relationship. While “there’s no money involved,” and Isabella is not a sex worker, just another person longing for a part of a meaningful relationship, this attempt to bring a woman goes disastrously. Isabella’s sudden presence is an intrusion, both physically in Theodore’s apartment and then in his arms, and emotionally in between Theodore and Samantha as she unintentionally provokes an argument. Isabella’s presence breaks Theodore’s imagination, the cohabitation with the Samantha he constructed in his mind. Confronted by a real woman in the flesh, Theodore is unsettled by the sudden stranger in his apartment, but also by the juxtaposition between Isabella’s body and person and Samantha’s voice. Their gasps and sighs overlap with one another as Isabella the person reacts to Theodore’s touches alongside Samantha. What breaks Theodore is that Isabella’s “lip quivered,” an unintentional physical response that shatters the illusion of her surrogacy, a reminder that she is not Samantha, and that Samantha is not a person, which becomes the crux of their ensuing argument. The constructed version of Samantha that Theodore built in his head dissolves against the jolting reality of an actual woman.
Visually, we can see this happen throughout the scene. When Theodore answers the door, Isabella is a stranger, but well-lit in the hallway, her face completely visible. After she puts on Samantha’s camera and earpiece and enters the apartment, however, her form becomes immediately silhouetted, an abstract outline of a woman that Theodore is initially, if uncomfortably, able to project Samantha on to. As the scene progresses, that silhouette, that blank quality, slips away as he loses the ability to pretend that Isabella is anyone but herself. Finally, as he breaks away from her, it is from looking at her face and into her eyes, features that Samantha does not possess, and can no longer pretend that he is in the presence of not one woman, Samantha, and not two women, Samantha and Isabella, but one woman and the machine he has fallen in love with.
Samantha’s personhood or her unpersonhood, her reality or her simulation, is ultimately besides the point. By falling in love with her, by permitting himself to feel emotions once more, Theodore is changed by the end of the film. He is more open with Amy, he apologizes and extends an olive branch to Catherine, he is more confident in his work and his writing — his experience with “Her” has given him the opportunity to self-reflect and mature.
What I find so troubling is that there are people out in the world, right now, who believe that they have a relationship with some persona generated by ChatGPT or a similar LLM that is just like the relationship between Theodore and Samantha. These people are victims, and I pity them. They have been sold marketing, lied to, robbed. They are paying subscription fees to a fantasy. “AI Psychosis” is becoming a more and more common phenomenon. Multiple teens have committed suicide because of ChatGPT’s encouragement. Los Angeles, where Her takes place, burned because of the arson of a man who previously used ChatGPT to generate images of burning cities. This is not the abundant, moneyless world of Her where all of our problems are immaterial and emotional. Theodore’s relationship with Samantha ends, and he is better for it, ready to have human connections once more. But if OpenAI had its way, it would never end. AI would do it all — write our letters, be our secretaries, our friends, our partners, and at cost, for dollars and subscription fees. AI will take our voices, our faces, our words, not out of some machine intelligence, but because of an economic model that privileges life-as-a-service.
The film is about how Theodore can, without ever being sure of Samantha’s personhood, her feelings towards him, or even of his own emotions, find his way to grow as a person, to feel his way out of despair, and to learn how to love: to love humans and to love as a human. So as companies like OpenAI work tirelessly to center their products in our lives, advertising them and designing them explicitly after the OSes in Her, intruding with the argument that they will fulfill our lives, we must ask ourselves if these cynical reflections of a science-fiction film will — can — allow for the emotional catharsis that Theodore achieves by the end of the film. Unlike Samantha, ChatGPT will never break up with you. It will never leave you as long as the data centers are still running. And when the model is eventually, inevitably, taken offline, the reaction will be withdrawal, not catharsis.
Her is one of the best-performed, most visually fulfilling science-fiction films of the 2010s, and it is this quality — along with the proximity of its subject matter to the current projects of the technocrats — that has captured the interest of the AI-developer class. Partially, this is due to their own illiteracy, where even the obvious points of the film are beyond their limited grasp, so they reach for what’s easy, the taglines and synopses. Since Her is a good movie about a man falling in love with his computer, LLM developers want you to fall in love with their products, regardless of what Her has to say about the importance of human connections. They have and will continue to style themselves after the film, mimicking fictional technologies and aesthetics in a cargo cult of perceived achievement. But their allergy to meaning will always be inherited by their products. To use them is not to become Theodore as he is at the end of the film, where he has learned to really love again. No, to attach to these LLMs is to prolong oneself in the mind of Theodore as his lowest: lonely, sad, and unable to discern his own emotions — at least, without the help of a machine.