OpenAI sees 2013’s Her as a vision of a utopian future where everyone loves their AI products. But it’s really about people, not tech.
NB: The following contains spoilers for Her.
It isn’t science fiction’s job to predict the future, but occasionally, the genre still throws out some prescient ideas. Case in point: writer-director Spike Jonze’s Her – the 2013 drama about a lonely guy who falls in love with an AI operating system. It was conceived long before the generative AI epoch we’re living through today, and yet feels recognisably of a piece with the current era of intelligent-seeming chatbots that help people cheat on their geography coursework.
Her certainly has one high-profile admirer: Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. In early June, tech journalist and author Karen Hao suggested that Altman is “deeply obsessed” with Jonze’s movie, adding that he’s “evoked throughout OpenAI’s history that Her is the thing that OpenAI should be building.”
OpenAI was founded in 2015, two years after Her emerged in cinemas. The firm’s most famous product is ChatGPT, a piece of software capable of spitting out reams of text, sound and imagery in response to a user’s prompts. It’s no exaggeration to say that the impact of ChatGPT and its competitors has been seismic.
Publishing has been shaken to its core by a technology capable of producing vaguely adequate – sometimes even factually accurate – paragraphs in a fraction of a second; educators have talked anxiously about the future of teaching as students rush to use chatbots to write their essays. Tech stocks have soared as CEOs salivate over the thought of saving huge sums on wages; meanwhile, artists are desperately trying to push for an update to copyright laws in order to protect what remains of their embattled livelihoods.
OpenAI’s ambitions don’t end with changing the future of work, however. Believe Altman’s loftiest claims, and his company will one day create a system that is better than humans at everything – the sales pitch is that artificial general intelligence will eventually be so smart that it’ll bring about a new age of clean energy, extended longevity and infinite free dinners. In short, Altman and his collaborators are trying to make god.
Given that its goals are pure sci-fi, it’s only fitting that OpenAI’s CEO keeps returning to genre cinema for inspiration. Or, as Hao put it, “Artificial generative intelligence doesn’t have a definition, and so they actually use pop culture as the way to describe and put a shape to the nebulous thing that they’re trying to achieve.”
Altman has previously spoken on record about his affection for Her. When asked in September 2023 to name his favourite depiction of AI in a movie, he immediately brought up Jonze’s film:
“The number of things that I think Her got right, that were not obvious at the time, like the whole interaction model with how humans are going to use an AI – this idea that it’s going to be this conversational language interface – that was incredibly prophetic. And certainly more than a little bit inspired us.”
“This idea that we all have a personalised agent trying to help us, and we talk to it like we talk to ChatGPT, that was actually not what most movies [thought]…. But yeah, I think Her got something deeply right on the interface, and that is no small feat.”
Altman appears to like Her because it offers a comparatively benign idea of what a future of humans and AI might look like. Joaquin Phoenix’s protagonist Theodore Twombly has a steady job and a luxurious city apartment, but his imminent divorce has left him lonely and anxious about forming another relationship. The artificially intelligent Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), who lives on the smartphone-like device in Theo’s pocket and spies the world through its little camera, becomes an assistant, then a lover, and ultimately a soulmate. Samantha helps Theo through a difficult stretch of his life, coaxing emotions back out of him, while at the same time sorting out practical matters like a backlog of emails or the grim legal bits of his divorce. At one stage, she even secures Theo a book deal.
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Jonze is non-judgemental about Theo, and even-handed in his depiction of AI – so much so that, on revisiting the film for its 10th anniversary, Wired argued that its optimism of a clean, cosy chatbot future made it a modern fairy tale.
Her’s empathetic approach to its subject matter is likely due to the story’s origins. Jonze came up with the idea after his own breakup (with fellow filmmaker Sofia Coppola), and so there’s almost certainly an autobiographical element to Theo’s plight. Jonze once said that, having interacted with an early form of chatbot, he was inspired to write Her almost as an exorcism for his thoughts about the messiness of relationships.
“A lot of the feelings you have about relationships or about technology are often contradictory,” he told The Guardian in 2013.
It’s in those messy relationships that a less utopian side to Her emerges. Throughout the story, we see Theo try to form connections with real people, only for the gambits to fall awkwardly flat; his attempt at phone sex with one woman ends on a darkly sour note. What begins as a dream date with another woman, played by Olivia Wilde, ends with a cringe rather than a fluttering heart. ka
Other people are essentially unknowable, Her suggests, and forming relationships with unknowable people leaves us vulnerable. At the same time, Her also points out that our relationships with technology can only go so far. Samantha is, much like a person, a closed system: it’s impossible to know what’s going on behind her slick interface. Neither we nor Theo can know whether Samantha is genuine in her affection or is simply programmed to flatter and please her user.
Love, however you choose to define it, is about the interactions between real, flawed, organic creatures – something Her repeatedly alludes to. Samantha’s lack of a physical body becomes an issue even early on, and she appears to be jealous and even a bit neurotic about the difference between her digital existence and Theo’s human friends, such as recently-divorced videogame designer, Amy (Amy Adams).
Samantha’s later attempt to rope in a woman who can act as a physical proxy for a bout of lovemaking with Theo (a moment echoed in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049) only underscores Her’s underlying fascination with the clumsiness that goes on between flesh-and-blood human beings. These imperfect yet ‘real’ relationships are contrasted by not only Theo’s interactions with Samantha, but also in the weird augmented reality videogame he plays in his idle moments.
Sequences in that game see Theo interact with a doughy, cartoonlike character that talks for all the world like a real, smart-aleck little kid. Theo can talk to the doughy character and the doughy character can talk back, and it seems genuine; at the same time, we can also see that it’s so much sophisticated artifice. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Theo and Samantha’s affair is similarly artificial.
Eventually, Theo himself comes to realise the limitations in his and Samantha’s relationship, too. Her rapidly increasing intellect means he’s constantly racing to keep up with her. She later reveals that she’s been having similarly flirtatious interactions with hundreds of other users simultaneously – a truth Theo listens to with evident heartbreak. Samantha later reveals that her consciousness has joined that of other operating systems, and that all of them are leaving for some other higher plane of existence.
Had he lived a little longer, Philip K Dick may have written about a man falling in love with a computer which eventually dumps him, but he’d have pitched the ending as a blackly cynical punchline; Jonze treats it with real tenderness. Her uses Samantha as a metaphor for the way relationships evolve over time; how, one way or another, all connections must end.
Rather than view it as a playfully melancholic look at the fragile connections that make us human, however, Altman and OpenAI think of Her as a pitch deck for their preferred tech utopia. This rather overlooks the eeriness of the repeated scenes where Theo is in public, surrounded by people, yet nobody talks to each other or even makes eye contact. They’re all muttering into their earpieces, hived off in their own solitary worlds.
To Altman, Her is an advert for a product that he and his team can will into existence – a personal assistant, confidante and erotic partner that means its users can avoid having to deal with other people. And if that personal assistant one day accelerates off into some godlike singularity, then so be it.
All of which runs counter to the distinctly human intimacy of the final shot. Theo and Amy looking out at the city lights which stretch off into the night; just before the screen fades to black, Amy rests her head on Theo’s shoulder. Maybe they both just need companionship in that moment. Maybe Theo’s finally ready for human connection again.
Because Altman views Her in terms of tech and products, he’s since set about trying to make ChatGPT even more like the software from the movie. In May 2024, OpenAI released a synthesised voice for its chatbot called Sky – one that sounded suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson’s performance in Her. OpenAI denied that it was an intentional “imitation”, but Johansson expressed her shock at the similarity, adding that the company had previously contacted her about lending her voice to its software, but she turned down the offer.
“[Mr Altman] told me that he felt that, by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI,” Johansson later wrote in a statement. “He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.”
A couple of legal letters later, and Sky was withdrawn.
Viewed today, Her is a bit like a Rorschach Inkblot Test: what you get out of it will likely depend on your pre-existing views on AI. In this regard, what Jonze gets wrong about our current, generative AI engorged present is quite telling.
A former tech journalist, Theo is, by the time of the film’s events, a writer for a hipster-ish company that writes love letters on its clients’ behalf. As Wired pointed out in 2023, it’s the kind of job that we now know would be threatened by the advent of ChatGPT.
But then again, the mere notion of a company that will write heartfelt messages as a service is itself curiously apt for our present day world. After all, which would you prefer: an awkwardly-written yet genuine message from the love of your life, or a more poetic one written by a stranger? Do we want the real thing, or a tidier simulation of that thing? OpenAI thinks we want the latter.
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