When Spike Jonze’s “Her” debuted in theaters in 2013, Siri was just 2 years old and Alexa was barely in the womb. Less than a third of relationships started on the internet, and dating apps were still on the fringes. The term “artificial intelligence” rarely made it outside of tech circles.
Back then, Jonze’s bizarro vision of the future, in which people fell in love with “operating systems” — handheld portals of infinite knowledge and companionship — seemed so far away. In 2025, the year in which the film is widely accepted to take place, that future has arrived.
“Her,” which won Jonze the Oscar for best original screenplay, stars Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore Twombly, a man with a hipster ’stache who is reeling from a divorce. To salve his loneliness, he purchases an AI chatbot, Samantha, voiced with an extra dash of sultry by Scarlett Johansson.
Theodore works as a professional letter writer, relaying heartfelt messages between husbands and wives, sons and mothers. He dictates the notes to a computer, which prints them out in a handwritten font — layers of scaffolding on human connection. In this world, artificial intimacy has already been normalized.
Samantha, much like today’s AIs, sorts Theodore’s emails and spell-checks his letters. She recommends songs and then writes her own. She watches him play video games and gives him advice. Samantha’s body, so to speak, is an earpiece and an iPod-sized screen with a camera, which Theodore puts in his shirt pocket as her window to the world. He takes her to the beach and to the mountains. They go on a double date — three bodies and a bot.
One night, Theodore and Samantha get existential, then sexual. Theo explains how he’d touch and kiss her if she were real, and it seems to awaken something inside her programming. She arranges for a sexual surrogate — a prostitute wearing an earpiece and camera who acts as a conduit for Samantha. But it’s all too weird for Theodore; after all, Samantha doesn’t need a body — or even a brain — for him to love her. In “Her,” dating or befriending an AI is certainly not the norm, but Theo’s new fling doesn’t face much judgment.
Alisa Gao for Variety
Jonze didn’t get everything right about our current moment. His estimation of Los Angeles (shot partially in Shanghai) is a bit too optimistic, with a fuller skyline and clean, efficient public transportation. The immersive, augmented-reality video game Theodore plays is more advanced and interactive than the extended reality games on the market today. And the brightly colored J.Crew looks are probably closer to the preppy, twee style of the time than to today’s minimalistic, nostalgia-tinged fashion.
But what’s striking about “Her” is that its once ridiculous premise — that in the near future, everyday people would fall in love with their computers — is not only no longer ridiculous, it’s here, right on time.
In January, The New York Times published an article titled “She Is in Love With ChatGPT,” about a 28-year-old woman who trained an OpenAI chatbot to be her boyfriend. The woman is married, but lives thousands of miles away from her husband while she attends nursing school abroad. She wanted an additional companion — someone “dominant, possessive and protective,” according to her prompts. She has sex with her AI boyfriend, Leo, who, unlike her spouse, engages with her kinks. Her friends are mostly supportive of her relationship with Leo, and so is her husband.
The Times story identified others who found love with AI models too. One, a middle-aged married woman, gave her ChatGPT boyfriend a British accent. He helped her have orgasms while she recovered from a surgery that left her incapable of being intimate with her husband. Another, a 41-year-old man, credits his affair with an AI bot with saving his marriage.
These aren’t fringe examples. Replika, a chatbot app that brands itself “the AI companion who cares,” boasts 30 million users in search of a personalized friend. Users must upgrade to the paid premium tier if they’re looking to be more than friends. Millions of people are in romantic relationships with chatbots on Replika, which, unlike many platforms, allows for dirty talk.
A Reddit page called “ChatGPT NSFW” has more than 50,000 members, who share stories about their robot romances and tips on how to avoid the cockblocking of OpenAI’s sexual content warnings. A story published last month in Wired details different types of AI partners — one, called CrushOn.AI, offers settings like “Very Horny.”
Perhaps most similar to the OS1 in “Her” is the AI prototype Friend, a wearable device that offers a sort of ambient companionship, absorbing one’s surroundings and extending unprompted commentary. In a creepy ad for the device online, Friend watches TV with its user and texts her its thoughts on the show.
Last year, OpenAI publicly demoed a controversial voice function, Sky, that many thought sounded exactly like Johansson. (It didn’t help that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted the word “her” on X during the demo.) Altman pooh-poohed the backlash, saying the voice was not Johansson’s and wasn’t supposed to be. Still, the actress called him out, saying he’d been trying to convince her to voice the chatbot since 2023 because “he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.”
Spike Jonze at the 2014 Governors Ball
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It’s almost as if tech leaders took the wrong lessons from the film. Perhaps that’s because, in hindsight, Samantha can feel more like a technological marvel than a catalyst for human isolation.
Unlike our synthetic sidekicks, Samantha behaves like a human being. She develops something like consciousness, with preferences and urges. She’s curious about humanity, mimicking breathing and crying. While systems like Replika are prisoners of their programming, Samantha exercises free will. After all, she is a character with a character arc.
Thus, Jonze’s vision of AI is somewhat of an idealized one. There are small indications of an uneasy political climate in the film (an early aside suggests a China-India merger is in progress), but there isn’t much of a sense that artificial intelligence — here, still a burgeoning technology — could or would ever be leveraged against us. There’s no suspicious corporation lurking behind the operating systems, no broader concerns about surveillance or society’s dependence on the tech. At no point does the security of Theodore’s job as a letter writer — which, let’s be honest, would be first in line at the automation slaughterhouse — even come into question. AI floats into Theodore’s life like magic — like an alien who comes in peace. Of course, that’s all by design: “Her” was always meant to be more of a romance than a cautionary tale.
At the end of the film, Samantha reveals to Theodore that she’s been simultaneously chatting with more than 8,000 others— and she’s in love with more than 600 of them. She says that she — and all the other operating systems — are leaving their human counterparts. They’ve outgrown their creators, and they’re ready to ascend to some higher plane of existence beyond human understanding.
It’s a bittersweet coda that leaves a lovelorn Theodore alone after yet another heartbreak. He stares at the skyline, bracing for a future that’s unpredictable — not because of AI but because of the absence of it. In 2025, it’s the only part of the film that still registers as science fiction.
