Has ‘Her’ Arrived?

Spike Jonze’ prescient 2013 film prophecies a world that’s grown more and more familiar

Warner Bros. Pictures

On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Tweeted simply, “her.” Coming from most users on Twitter, this might have seemed like a subtle message to an ex-girlfriend or an unrequited love. But coming from the face of the AI company changing the planet with each passing iteration, it was nothing short of eerie.

This cryptic message he unceremoniously posted referred to the 2013, Spike Jonze-directed film, Her. But it wasn’t a random reflection back on the decade-old film. It was in response to the seismic leap forward that he and his company had just achieved. Going by the name ChatGPT-4o, it represents what’s almost inarguably the greatest shift in the world of artificial intelligence since the generative AI revolution first began a little over a year ago.

ChatGPT-4o responds to anything said to it with the same response time you can expect from normal people. The inflections in its voice are enough to feel like there’s a real human being speaking back to you. It responds to questions with a delighted enthusiasm, to bad news with concern, and to uncomfortable information with awkward pauses.

This iteration of ChatGPT is the most successful attempt at multi-modal communication yet, with an ability to understand text, image, video, audio, and to produce each. In essence, what the company has created is only a modest step away from precisely what the movie Her depicts.

For anyone who’s seen the 2013 film, there’s likely no movie that’s served as a greater predictor of this AI age we’re now living. So often in the past, movies that delved into the subject of AI treated it with the same level of grandeur and impossibility as they did laser beams on interstellar cruise ships.

But it’s the Ex-Machina’s, Black Mirror’s, and Her’s of the world that most presciently understood the reality we were marching toward. They don’t treat the subject matter they traffic in as the content of a faraway future. When viewers get bogged down in sci-fi jargon, there’s a sense of relatability that shows and movies often lose.

Even while those stories render realities that were distant and a little lofty when they were initially released, our humanity feels alive enough in all of them for the portrayals to feel grounded. We’re presented as the same people we are today, but confronted with increasingly surreal scenarios.

But even while some of those futures felt unfeasible in the not-so-distant past, they’ve suddenly arrived at our doorstep. In Ex-Machina, AI manifests as a lifelike automaton. And while the movie elicits conversations about these artificial minds we create, as well as their motives, there’s still something comfortably distant about the fully mechanized cyborg into which the personality is transplanted. More and more tech companies have begun showing off videos of their various advanced robots, but the humanoid machine in homes is still a future that feels a safe distance away.

The form that AI takes in Her is one that’s grown more and more believable to the masses in recent months as sophisticated AI relationships have actually become possible. But the ability to have the conversations with ChatGPT that we now can lends a terrifying amount of credibility to the world that Her outlined back in 2013.

Only a year ago, OpenAI wowed the world when ChatGPT-3 arrived on the scene. And though it was hard not to be stunned by the technology then, people will soon forget that that original version had no ability to process photos, let alone talk to you. Little more than a year later, ChatGPT-4o speaks to users with a level of apparent emotional intelligence high enough to make even the most wide-eyed tech enthusiast tremble.

In Her, Scarlett Johansson’s voice embodies an AI as it gradually advances, and Joaquin Phoenix plays a tortured Theodore Twombly as he quickly falls in love with her.

The Arcade Fire soundtrack checkered delicately throughout the film is every bit as haunted and electric as the world the movie paints. It’s drawn out, grating, and discordant. But in Johansson’s coming to life, there’s a beauty to the melodies that emerge. As she becomes more and more of a person in her thoughts and desires, the music grows more intricate and alive.

One of the film’s most defining characteristics is the loneliness latticed throughout. The color palettes drift between warm and cool to capitalize on the characters’ growing affections as well as the stark and mechanical realities of their world.

Happy moments feel joyous, colorful, detailed, and alive. They tap into the frenetic majesty of the future we’re rapidly pioneering.

But the melancholy moments punctuated throughout the film are painful and instill a vicarious fear and isolation in viewers. They embody the precise sort of numbness and abandon that people have grown more and more familiar with in the years since it was first released. And those feelings have only reached a fever pitch ever since artificial intelligence has entered the public sphere. The conversation around the paradigm shift we’re living through has grown difficult to escape.

One of the most bizarre things about the sci-fi films that predict our future is how often and how swiftly those imagined realities come to fruition. In this age of exponential change, a single year can alter the way even the most fantastical stories are received. Ten years ago watching the film, it was an interesting and futuristic concept. It was so unbelievably far in the distance that there was no real fear we’d ever actually arrive there.

Last year, Her was a freight train looming over the horizon. Today watching it, I can feel the moving metal’s vibrations on the ground beneath my feet. I can feel the gusts of that mystifying future beginning to blow.

The realities of Her haven’t quite arrived. But have a conversation with the AI yourself, and you’ll be hard-pressed to deny we’re getting close to them. It won’t be this iteration, or the next iteration, but the lonely future of sentient AI lovers is likely to arrive soon. We’re approaching artificial general intelligence now, and if we advance much further, we’ll lose the reins we still have on the technology. What remaining control we retain over this slithering genie will vanish from sight completely.

But one of Her’s most special achievements is to keep beauty alive even as the plot grows darker. It’s at once devastatingly sad and eerily enchanting. It’s dire, driven, intimate, and grand. It’s a quintessentially crafted reminder that, even as we invent gadgets that reshape the world around us, we remain flawed, alive, and loving humans confined to dizzying present moments. It’s a soul-stirring push to look out at the sun in its true colors as it rises over this strange new horizon we’re all facing.

Originally published on Medium