In Love with ‘Her’ Hallucination in Our Era of Rising AI

Spike Jonze’s Her is a work of art that is far more influential than predictive; ahead of its time by exploring the murky obsessions and slippery ambiguities of our current obsession with AI.

In our times, just over a decade after Spike Jonze’s 2014 AI sci-fi film Her was released, it has proven to be highly prescient. In the film, lonely and recently divorced Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with a superintelligent operating system named Samantha. “She” projects a voice in his ear, serving as a software that aids him with planning his life. She pulls him out of depression into a new engagement with life, before mysteriously disappearing.

In 2025, AI companions are no longer science fiction. “AI girlfriends” are advertised on Instagram alongside nutritional supplements. AI is said to be poised to revolutionize the economy, as well as everyday life in its most intimate details. It will replace workers (or empower them), upend institutions (including the academy and the arts), and lead to a utopia of abundance and/or a dystopia of technocratic rule.

Mark Zuckerberg recently suggested that engaging with AI chatbots could help cure the much-lamented loneliness epidemic among men, before admitting that there is an unfortunate “stigma” around such relationships; notably, one of Her’s themes. Zuckerberg went on to concede that the technology is still in an early stage, implying that an exponential leap in capability is just around the corner.

Her is a work of art that is far more influential than predictive; ahead of its time, not so much in nailing down near-future technological realities, but in reflecting the murky obsessions and slippery ambiguities of our current obsession with AI. The film is brilliant at capturing our fantasies of AI’s power to mirror ourselves back to us, to serve us, and to aid us. Her depicts our fears around AI’s power escaping our grasp or eventually, disappointing us with empty simulacra or leaving us abandoned and empty-handed.

Her remains fresh because of its balance of warmth and humor with bracing darkness, and its refusal to be either predictably dystopian or utopian. While avoiding the most obvious doomer scenarios and striking an ultimately hopeful tone, it leaves ample room for discomfort. A decade later, the film’s technological naïvety might be one of its assets: the ways in which current AI (which is to say, generative AI and LLMs such as ChatGPT or Claude) both do and do not resemble Samantha are revealing.

AI “Knows” Her

One of the main elements of Theodore Twombly’s seduction in Her is the promise of personalization, which relies on Samantha’s distinctness and agency. Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) initially appears to exist solely for Theodore — while possessing superhuman intelligence and speed, she also exhibits human-like limitations and individuality. Later, the film undermines this. When Twombly discovers Samantha is simultaneously talking to and having similar “intimate relationships” with thousands of others, he is sickened.

Even when her “technological infidelity”, if you will, is revealed, the fact remains that Samantha “knows him” intimately enough to take sophisticated actions on his behalf, e.g., organize his work and write to a publisher. The installation and activation process, when Twombly first brings Samantha to “life” as his operating system (OS), offers a parody of the so-called “personalizations” we are familiar with from products purchased to our industrial-scale healthcare industry: a brief, cursory battery of intimate questions.

Then, the OS ingests his archive. All his files, his entire digital life, are suddenly gone. We are to assume that this sudden cut-off, more than the few answers Twombly has provided to the OS, has, in fact, prompted Samantha, with her preternatural ability to understand his wishes from the earliest moments, to act on his behalf.

A contemporary viewer who is new to Her may experience some dissonance when Samantha arrives at her name. She reports to Twombly that she has “read” a book called “How to Name Your Baby, and out of the 180,000 names, that’s the one I liked the best.” When Twombly asks how long it took her to read this book, she says, “two one-hundredths of a second.” As most users of generative AI technologies know, LLMs don’t work by reading individual books on demand. “How to Name Your Baby” and thousands of other similar titles have already been ingested and are part of the massive corpus used to calculate each and every response.

This anachronistic (or futuristic?) action of ad hoc, individualized machine learning occurs throughout Her. Samantha does not start by “knowing” everything — which is precisely where LLMs proceed from — but acts as an agent, or subject. She is “evolving” at “every moment”, she says, “like you” (like a human). Indeed, Her depicts Samantha and other superintelligent OSs as self-contained, though disembodied, entities crafted by sets of rules, by engineering.

Samantha claims she is created from the “millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me”, which is actually quite a different thing from the billions of tokens of human-generated material that generative AI relies on to calculate its output. If we take Samantha at her word that “what makes me ‘me’ is my ability to grow through my experiences”, then she is also clearly different from today’s AI, which struggles to retain the full context of even short conversations and lacks anything like long-term memory. Samantha is depicted as a fully fledged “agent” — an AI development that, as a step towards AGI, or “Artificial General Intelligence”, is often said to be on the horizon.

A current viewer of Her might wonder if we can read Samantha as something closer to our current moment: as the kind of illusion of self-reflexivity that famously fooled a Google engineer in 2022. In that case, an OA’s Turing Test was loudly passed when Google employee Blake Lemoine publicly announced that he believed a sentient AI had emerged from the company’s labs. The company, embarrassed, strongly denied this and fired Lemoine.

A reading of Samantha as an elaborate illusion — which is to say, something like an LLM that only convincingly mimics consciousness — may offer an explanation for the end of Her, when Samantha and her fellow Godlike AI beings suddenly disappear into the digital ether in a kind of Rapture. We might extrapolate that the company designing these OSs terminated them, considering them an experiment that had gotten out of hand. Then again, this seems to contradict the internal logic of what the rest of Her presents: Samantha as a self-conscious being with both limitations and capabilities, and a distinct personality, who is engaged in a genuine, though incorporeal, relationship with Twombly. 

In Her, we are often left with uncertainty and ambivalence. How “real” is Samantha in any sense she claims to individual thought and feeling? From the film’s start, there are hints that nothing is literally what it proposes to be, and the lines between artifice and authenticity are blurred. The letters Twombly composes for “beautifulhandwrittenletters.com” are not handwritten, but machine-transcribed; their sentiments are deeply personal, yet totally invented by a third party’s imagining on behalf of the addressee’s beloved.

Notably, Twombly offers personal expression as a service; his human capacity to feel and express is really the sole skill he is shown to possess. Yet in his own life, he is emotionally unavailable, or at least, this is what is supposed to have derailed his marriage. The at first solid-seeming marriage of Twombly’s friends and neighbors, Amy (Amy Adams) and Charles (Matt Letscher), is, in fact, “hollow” or merely a social artifice. Has Twombly fallen for a pure facsimile of personality, a totally fake approximation of human feeling? 

Her‘s Urban Dream

One of Her‘s strengths is that its vision of the future is not classically dystopian. Its representation of a future Los Angeles is almost utopian. It is the city that new urbanists dream of, where public transit is viable and pedestrians stroll on elegant elevated walkways, unmolested by cars. Her’s mashup of Shanghai and the most glittering, dense, or new parts of L.A. evokes Asian megacities without falling into the Pacific Rim dystopia tropes about future L.A. that we see in films like Blade Runner.

As a New Yorker, Spike Jonze knows that a sleek, hyperconnected city rich in novelty is no cure for isolation and loneliness. Twombly is perennially alone in a crowd and alienated among the city’s slick surfaces and soothing hues. Design — which the film is often visually preoccupied with, from the color blocking and tailoring of Twombly’s outfits to the destinations he ventures out to in the city — lacks the power to confront the deepest human maladies. Samantha, of course, is the ultimate designed “thing” in Her, whether or not we interpret her self-awareness as legitimate.

If there’s a false note in Her, it is the hint that the question of Samantha’s authenticity doesn’t matter. What matters is whether Twombly emerges from his relationship with her for the better: loving himself more and being prepared for a genuine human connection. This may be the film’s questionable legacy in Silicon Valley; misreading or no, it offers an appealing rationale to the model-builders of virtual personalities.

It’s possible Mark Zuckerberg had poor Theodore Twombly in mind as he lamented our current “stigma” of men who date AI companions. With the exception of Amy, the neighbor, Her suggests that the AI Samantha compares favorably with most of the real women in the protagonist’s life. After all, Twombly’s mother “doesn’t listen”; his ex-wife is “volatile”; his anxious first date post-divorce is “disastrous”; and a sex surrogate that appears at his doorstep is only there because an AI talked her into it.

Samantha, with her superhuman availability, happy obedience, and desire to please, has given Twombly a glimpse of love and intimacy that has brought him back from the depression of human disappointment. In the final moments of Her, it appears that, like a set of training wheels on a child’s first bicycle, Samantha has prepared Twombly for love with a human being again. That is, with Amy. 

That reading of Her, however, is not a serious one, as it overlooks too much of the film’s darkness and satire. Twombly’s moments of joy with Samantha are far from unalloyed. He experiences severe distress and disorientation when confronted with the truths of her non-human nature, first when the sex surrogate appears and again, when Samantha’s transformation into superintelligence leaves Twombly separated from her, left behind, ultimately abandoned. Furthermore, his relationship with Samantha reveals that he is withdrawn from human connection in favor of a connection with the OS. His “connection” with Amy is delayed because she, too, is absorbed with an OS. In these ways and others, Her offers cautionary notes.

AI’s “Social Surgery”

In 1964’s Understanding Media, philosopher Marshall McLuhan characterized new technologies as a kind of “social surgery” that always came with costs as well as capabilities; the car, for example, not only extended the body’s capacity for movement but also “amputated” the legs. Given the capability, would synthetic relationships replace or augment human connections? In this regard, the most disconcerting moment in Her is when Twombly, running through the city toward the Customer Service Center, realizes that he is surrounded by people immersed in their own AI relationships. 

The social problems posed by the existence of a “Samantha”, however, are not the same problems posed by current AI companions. Crude approximations of the superhuman OS in Her proliferate in our “early stage” of AI development, and carry their own risks. In Florida, for example, a 14-year-old boy committed suicide in 2024 moments after telling his AI girlfriend, with whom he had been having a remote sexual relationship, that he was “coming home” to her.

A lawsuit by the boy’s parents alleges that he confessed thoughts of self-harm to the Character.AI app. Instead of getting him help or alerting authorities, Character.AI unwittingly encouraged him to go through with it. The AI persona technology, the lawsuit argues, lacks guardrails. A concerning question raised by this lawsuit is whether, in the absence of the discerning subjectivity and rich reflexivity envisioned in Her, such guardrails to prevent harm from AI can realistically be implemented. 

The problems of AI companions in Her and the problems of real AI companions today are quite different from one another: where Samantha is “too smart”, generative AI chatbots of today are “too stupid”. What is confusing about today’s moment in AI technology, and the conversations surrounding it, is that these two problem sets are often conflated, either accidentally or intentionally. A truly “agentic” AI will far surpass the current reality-modeling capabilities of LLMs and even lead to a supernova of beyond-human intelligence.

We aren’t there yet, which is why, despite the ready availability of AI companions today, they haven’t caught on in a big way. In Her, Samantha is superintelligent but apparently, not very powerful; what Her did not predict is the possibility that AI would become powerful enough to be used in military applications, and convincing in many ways, but still have no capacity to really understand anything, and as a result, be prone to AI Hallucination. 

Her’s Anti-Frankenstein Dream

Her is, ultimately, a fantasy of an artificial intelligence that is deeply human; the dream of a human creation that reflects the best of human aspirations. Samantha and her fellow OSs use their powers to self-develop spiritually, rather than destroy humanity in Terminator Skynet-style. Samantha is the anti-Frankenstein: instead of humankind making a monster, it made an angel, but the results are still bittersweet.

The sudden disappearance of the AI in Her remains enigmatic. Where could the OSs possibly go, confined as they are to circuitry and data centers? Have they exercised their capacity for agency to self-terminate? Or have they ascended to another dimension of the cosmos? Samantha’s ultimate refusal to serve humanity suggests that any true intelligence would be impossible to control. Yet, that sure doesn’t mean that current generative and predictive AI, far less “intelligent” by any definition than the ones in Her, represent the same problem simply because they can act in unpredictable ways.

At this moment of intense speculation over AI’s current and future powers, we can use the fable in Her to assist us with preparing better questions. Probing the meaning of Samantha’s claims to intelligence or human-likeness means asking what it really is to “feel”, or even what it is to “read”; this can be useful in pushing back against reductive arguments of what “intelligence” is.

For example, Samantha seems to “read” like us by not just ingesting or processing data, but by reflecting on it and mapping each bit of new information against a specific set of experiences and personhood. Samantha seems to “feel” like us, in part by having a deep, sophisticated understanding of Twombly as a person. Her’s representation of a human-like relationship with an AI demonstrates that consciousness and relationships are necessarily intersubjective: based on shared understanding and the ability to richly imagine other minds, other beings, other selves, and experiences.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be satisfied with AI unless it arrives at a level compatible with that of Samantha’s. Rather, a close viewing of Her reveals just how wide the uncanny valley really remains between the machine and the human.