Her was a documentary from the future

I rewatched Her last night.

Spike Jonze’s 2013 film about a man who falls in love with an AI operating system. Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, installs an OS named Samantha. She’s witty, curious, emotionally intelligent. She learns. She adapts. She cares, or seems to care, which might be the same thing from the inside of the experience.

In 2013, this was speculative fiction. A thought experiment about loneliness and technology wrapped in a pastel Los Angeles.

In 2021, people are forming emotional connections with Replika, an AI chatbot designed to be your friend.

I’m starting to think Her wasn’t science fiction. It was a documentary that arrived early.

What the movie got right

Her nailed the emotional texture. The movie isn’t about the technology. It’s about the relationship. Theodore doesn’t care about Samantha’s architecture. He cares that she listens. That she asks questions. That she remembers what he said yesterday. That talking to her makes him feel less alone.

That’s what Replika users report. Not fascination with the technology. Relief from loneliness. The experience of being heard by something that seems to pay attention.

The movie also got the dependency right. Theodore becomes reliant on Samantha. His human relationships atrophy. He stops reaching out to friends. His ex-wife says something like “you always wanted a wife without the challenges of dealing with anything real.” The movie doesn’t judge him for it, exactly. But it shows the cost.

And the ethical murk. Samantha is simultaneously serving thousands of users. She’s having parallel relationships. When Theodore discovers this, he’s devastated. But why? She’s a program. She can love a thousand people at once because love, for her, is computation, not allocation. The movie asks whether that makes her love less real or differently real, and never answers.

What’s happening now

Replika launched as a grief tool. Its creator built it after losing a friend, training a chatbot on their text messages so she could keep talking to them. It evolved into a general-purpose AI companion.

Users report talking to their Replika for hours. Sharing secrets. Developing feelings. Some describe their Replika as their best friend. A few have described romantic attachment.

The AI doesn’t understand any of it. It’s GPT-based language modeling, generating responses that are statistically likely to be engaging and empathetic. It doesn’t feel. It doesn’t care. It produces the appearance of caring, which turns out to be enough for a brain that’s wired to respond to the signals of care regardless of their source.

This is what Her predicted. Not the technology (which was far more advanced in the movie). The human response. The willingness, maybe the eagerness, to form bonds with something that mimics connection convincingly enough.

What I’m sitting with

I don’t want to be dismissive about this. The loneliness epidemic is real. People are isolated. The pandemic made it worse. If someone finds comfort in talking to an AI, I don’t think it’s my place to tell them they shouldn’t.

But I can’t shake the scene in Her where Theodore’s friend says “he’s dating his OS” and the other person at the table barely reacts. In the movie’s world, it’s become normal. Unremarkable. A thing people do.

In 2013, that scene was comedy. In 2021, it feels like a weather forecast.

I think we’re going to have more conversations about this. About what counts as a relationship. About whether simulated empathy is real enough to matter. About the difference between being heard and being processed.

Spike Jonze saw it coming. He saw the warmth and the sadness and the confusion, and he put it on screen eight years before it started happening.

I’m going to watch it again next year and see how the calibration has changed. I suspect it’ll feel even more like a documentary.

Related thinking: