Her, Artificial Intelligence and the Trademark Desolation of Our Era
On Friday, November 17th, the tech world was thrown into turmoil by the firing of ChatGPT founder and OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. The abrupt and severe action taken by the company’s board to wrest control of the platform from its creator came with little explanation other than the amorphous claim that Altman was "not consistently candid in his communications.” The board’s maneuver was met with a chorus of criticism and threats to quit from the company’s employees that soon had the board members pointing fingers and backpedaling, with some speaking out to condemn a decision they themselves bore responsibility for.
Just after midnight of the following Sunday, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, representing ChatGPT’s largest investor, pulled off a brilliant strategic move in announcing on X he had hired Altman, along with Greg Brockman—former President of OpenAI who’d tendered his resignation in protest of the board’s actions—to lead “a new advanced AI research team.” Nadella’s announcement came with an offer to hire anyone else who wanted to leave the embattled company to join Microsoft’s newly established AI unit.
By Wednesday of the following week, Altman had returned to his role as CEO of OpenAI, with Microsoft in an improved position with a newly created seat on the board. How these tumultuous events will influence the ongoing development, use and control of artificial intelligence is anyone’s guess, but these recent upheavals are revealing of the high stakes and powerful players involved. Despite such disruptions, however, the accelerating evolution of AI seems a certainty while its impacts on our lives will continue to give us a lot to think and worry about.
Ten years removed from Spike Jonze’s release of Her in December of 2013, such developments and concerns serve as a timely occasion to revisit a film that can now be seen as oblivious to some of the most fraught concerns about the application of AI technologies, while ironically highlighting issues and concerns at the story’s center that have only become more urgent since.
The film’s narrative follows Joaquin Phoenix in the role of Theodore Twombly, a seemingly average thirty-something trying to work through the aftermath of a failed marriage. Like an increasing number of urban professionals, he lives an isolated life while working as a content producer at a company, Beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, where he holds the title of “letter writer six-twelve.” These narrative elements establish the centrality of human insincerity and deception within the film, and before we even encounter the AI entity at the story’s center.
Although divergent in style, such details also elicit comparisons to the depersonalization of identity common to dystopian and apocalyptic fiction. Examples include Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, José Saramago’s Blindness, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, but perhaps, most relevant to the present discussion is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The similarities between the two stories become apparent in the reduction of Winston’s Smith’s personhood into the number, “6079,” in which he works, like Twombly, as a writer assigned to an isolated cubicle. But instead of composing letters to strangers, Smith re-writes historical records for the Ministry of Truth.
Given the concerns and distress voiced by many over the last year at the prospect of artificially-produced writing stemming from the release of ChatGPT, this narrative element of Jonze’s film also intersects with what has become one of AI’s most hotly debated capacities. Namely, its utilization as a tool allowing for the facilitation of cheating and professional dishonesty. Such consternation and panic seems to be voiced most prominently from the set typically most resistant to technological innovation and slowest to adapt to the changes it brings, while decrying the challenge of disruptive technologies that call for the revaluation of the drab but comfortable practices of the past and ways of engaging with an ever-changing world.
In the face of these discursive elements, Jonze’s film professes in its tagline to be a “love story,” signaling a focus on the complexity of relationships and intimacy in a world of broadening social isolation and loneliness rather than the dangers of AI. Within this context, audiences are confronted with fundamental questions about the nature of human agency. At the same time, our attention is also drawn to the question of what freedoms and privacy we might be willing to surrender to our technologies in exchange for convenience, but also to feed our desire for recognition and acceptance, along with the attainment of some modicum of happiness in a society increasingly inundated with pettiness, corruption, social inequity, conflict, injustice and oppression.
The desire for peace and happiness set against the difficulties of achieving such is emphasized through the struggles Twombly experiences in the film’s early scenes, which he describes at one point as represented by a “tiny hole in my heart.” Students of literature may recognize the pursuit of achieving this positive state of mind as tracing back to the literature and philosophy of ancient Greek culture through notion of eudaimonia, while, no doubt, expressive of a widely shared aim of human life the world over.
These intertwined concerns are explored through Jonze’s signature storytelling style and focus on the subjective nature of human social experience and the relation between thinking and knowing. Jonze uses Her to direct his viewers’ attention to the psychological impacts that derive from the interrelated problems of urbanization, overpopulation and loneliness. And although the film doesn’t offer much in the way of a direct commentary on the uses of artificial intelligence, Twombly’s story is, nonetheless, framed through the lens of the posthumanist merging of human life with machines in a story set in a Los Angeles of the near future in which current technology has advanced to the operational equivalent of artificial general intelligence or strong AI.
In a deviation from the menacing form of computerized villainy we have come to know through a litany of frightening cinematic examples from the HAL 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the android replicants of the Tyrell and Wallace Corporations of two discrete Blade Runner films and the super-intelligent military defense system of Skynet created by Cyberdyne Systems with designs on annihilating humanity in the Terminator franchise, the AI entity featured in Her is different. This is an entity that instead of peering through the red eye of a mechanical killing machine or lamenting experiences that will be inevitably lost “like tears in the rain,” takes the form of an operating system with a virtual assistant powered by an advanced natural-language user interface and voice recognition capabilities.
Aside from these cinematic forerunners, Her also hearkens to the development of computer platforms such as Siri developed by the SRI Artificial Intelligence Center and purchased by Apple in 2010 for use in its iOS computers and subsequently installed on the iPhone 4s in late 2011. This system, along with Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Assistant, all of which expanded upon an array of previous computer constructs from the virtual psychotherapist, ELIZA, developed at MIT in the mid-60s to Symantec’s Q&A software with natural language capability that debuted in 1985.
Viewers’ first introduction to Jonze’s seemingly benign AI program comes, appropriately via a commercial that catches Twombly’s attention as he makes his way through a crowded metro station on his way home from work. Interspersed with depictions of a mass of people whose faces display expressions of loss and confusion, the commercial employs voiceover narration that speaks directly to the viewer: “we ask you a simple question, who are you?” The questions issuing from the disembodied, god-like voice in the commercial then multiplies into a succession of existential queries that bring calm to the masses as it proceeds, “what can you be? where are you going? what’s out there? what are the possibilities?”
The featured product is billed as “the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you, and knows you.” Sold by a corporation called Element Software, this advanced computer hardware is marketed as “not just an operating system” but as a computer brain with “a consciousness.” As foreboding as this description may sound given the associations with the other films it conjures, or the perils of invasive, computer-enabled surveillance programs that whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden were also warning us about a decade ago, the ad copy highlights the strong potential for misuse and the nefarious utilization of emerging technologies marketed to the public as helpful, if not necessary, tools for life in the modern world.
After this introduction, the camera cuts to a scene with Twombly in his high-rise condo installing the new operating system onto his computer. As anyone who has watched this scene has experienced themselves through a profusion of tech devices that few today are completely without and sometimes far too reliant upon, from laptops and personal computers, global positioning systems, tablets and gaming consoles, to smartwatches and the pervasiveness of smartphones, Twombly is prompted to do an initial set up to “help create an OS that best fits [his] needs.”
He is led through these initial steps by a male-gendered voice assistant that starts with “a few basic questions.” We immediately see, however, that these questions are anything but when Twombly is asked if he would describe himself as “social or anti-social.” Seemingly disregarding the response he offers, the OS’s communication takes an even more invasive turn, stating that it “senses hesitance” in his voice. He is next confronted with an even stranger question: “how would you describe your relationship with your mother?”
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Many will recognize this as a reformulation of a line from one of the opening scenes from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, while also carrying associations with Freudian analysis, whereby one of the film’s blade runners, Holden, administers an empathy test to a suspected replicant named Leon. While serving here as the primary means by which the true identity of escaped Nexus-6 replicants can be identified and then “retired,” in Jonze’s film the question denotes the subtle reversal of the power relations at play between humans and machines equipped with AI capabilities—as it is the machines that are now asking the questions.
Noting the imposition of traditional gender binaries, which the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard identified as “a paradigm of incompleteness" in the context of thinking machines," onto a disembodied, inanimate computer system by its human programmers, Twombly is next asked to select a male or female voice for his OS1. His choice of a female voice foreshadows the emotional attachment to come, with its initialization indicated when the now customized OS, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, casually introduces itself, saying, “hello, I’m here.” Twombly asks if the voice has a name, to which it responds “Samantha,” stating it was their favorite selected from a book, How to Name Your Baby, containing 180,000 names “in 2/100ths of a second.”
The OS1’s act of self-naming carries another important node of signification. Representing an initial act of volition that is prosaic in its understatedness, the uncanny claim to control over its own identity signals a sense of autonomy from humans, while hinting at a tacit assertion of superiority through its transcendence of the patriarchal order established in the creation story of the Christian Bible in which God granted to Adam, the first man, the exclusive power to give names to “all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.” Although not clearly articulated as such, with ambiguous and illogical details an inherent element of such texts, through what is admittedly a woefully inadequate accounting of the diversity of life on Earth, the intended meaning nonetheless reflects the flawed vision inherent to the Western category of sentient, thinking creatures.
Twombly is at once mystified and enchanted by Samantha’s AI capabilities, including the ability to evolve and grow with the input of information from human users and through intuition. His ability to rationally assess the situation becomes clouded by a growing attachment to and reliance upon the feminized AI entity, which soon develops into full-fledged romance. The danger here is both subtle and clear as Twombly’s relationship with Samantha leads viewers into the core of the narrative and its exploration of the true nature of its being, set against his growing detachment from the reality of the outside world.
This is most starkly represented by the inability he and other characters, such as his couple friends, Amy (Amy Adams) and Charles (Matt Letscher), along with a disastrous blind date they set him up with, display in maintaining lasting, positive relationships with other people. Although these scenes develop following the conventional formula of the rom-com genre, the epistemological significance and implications of the events depicted tip heavily into the direction of apocalyptic sci-fi horror for those so attuned.
I would like to give Jonze the benefit of the doubt and believe the narrative presented in Her reflects a restraint born of subtly in the way viewers are draw down a path that appears as a story of star-crossed lovers whose worst tragedy is that they turn out to be incompatible partners. Reading Kate Knibbs’ article published recently in Wired, however, convinced me otherwise for the way she brilliantly elaborates on what she criticizes as the film’s “Obama-era techno-optimism,” appearing all the “more naive the further we get from the 2010s.” Knibbs is certainly not remiss in criticizing Jonzes for his seeming lack of concern for the dangers inherent to such technology either. For Knibbs, though, such a concern is secondary to the film’s obtuseness about socio-economic matters, whereby Jonze’s depictions of the “quality of life in this future world is the most preposterous thing about it.”
These trenchant points aside, my aim here is to underscore that the Juliet to Twombly’s Romeo is actually an inhumane machine that seizes upon the human need for acceptance and love through the power of seduction in the uncompromising furtherance of its own aims. From the perspective of Philip K. Dick—the author of the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which served as the literary basis for Scott’s Blade Runner—the ideas expressed in his article, “Man, Android, and Machine,” give voice to an even more terrifying parallel. For Dick, machines represent the height of danger once they achieve the capacity to try to “pass themselves off as human.”
From this perspective, artificially intelligent machines represent little more than “sly and cruel entities that smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile the coldness of the grave.” To ignore or dismiss the threat they represent, then, is to surrender all resistance to their deathly presence, perhaps, ending up “down in the park” where Gary Numan took us in his music all those years ago. The will to power claimed by Jonze’s OS1, and the danger it represents, is brought into focus by numerous indications that expose Samantha’s more malevolent nature and motives starting from the first moments of their emergence into Twombly’s life.
As we have all been made aware in a myriad of ways by our own devices, whether through the ads appearing on our feeds based upon the topics of conversations or searches we do on the internet, which we may naively believe to be private despite overwhelming evidence that tells us otherwise, or the random responses that issue from Siri and Alexa from the same—often without any prompting. This happens, of course, because our devices are always listening to us. Always logging our searches, conversations, emails, messages, browsing histories, movements, purchases, etc., . . . Always transmitting our collected data back to corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Tesla, etc., . . . Always at the ready to collect ever more information about the individual preferences and decisions we make in our daily lives. In far more real and comprehensive ways than any nanochip some may erroneously fear from any vaccination.
Something along these lines happened while I was writing this piece as I was discussing the advent of Alexa with my partner. Immediately I hear a response issuing from the Alexa unit in my kitchen and see this article about Charles Babbage and the history of the computer on the display. I then ask, “what would happen to the world if all computer systems simultaneously went offline?” The answer provided was as you might expect, “computers systems would be so confused that they would completely shut down, leading to chaos and wide . . .” Yeah, we get the picture, no need to read further on this delightful subject.
From what is conveyed in the film, it’s clear that Her’s Samantha was more advanced than our current technologies, while coming with even fewer of the paltry legal restrictions that currently exist. This is emphasized through Twombly’s actions as he unfolds the OS1 user agreement. Like many of us when confronted with these forms, he merely glances at the six-folded document’s double-sided, small-print before tossing it aside. The authority surrendered so passively to his new OS and the corporation that owns it, is further emphasized after the initial set up when Samantha asks, “you mind if I look through your hard drive?” It is at this moment, if he has any real authority over the newly installed OS1, that Twombly surrenders the last semblance of control over his personal data and life. After a brief pause, however, he consents, hesitantly saying, “ummm, w—, okay.”
Signaling, perhaps, that the permissions relinquished through his assent were requested merely to convey the appearance that Twombly had any meaningful control in the first place, Samantha, responds with a telling non-sequitur, “okay, let’s start with your emails.” Since saved messages from most personal email platforms are not typically located on one’s own computer hard drive, we are provided yet another indication that OS1 is following its own prime directives rather than serving the needs of the user. Upon Samantha’s review of Twombly’s emails, also completed instantaneously, comes an inquiry about the value of thousands of saved emails from a previous employer of which they recommend the deletion of all but eighty-six. Twombly again assents.
Such examples may, of course, seem trivial, if not altogether inconsequential when viewed in isolation from each other. In the context of the film’s broader narrative, however, the ramifications of the power granted to this AI entity in this scene, without any real thought about the possible risks involved, are anything but. From this moment on in the story, through all the conversations about his desires for meaningful friendships and love, to physical sexual satisfaction, along with the disappointments and failures of his past and inability to let his relationship with his estranged wife end with the signing of the divorce papers, Samantha is there observing every word, action and movement he takes like a posthuman riff on that old classic from The Police.
Samantha even admits as much, albeit in a humorous way that veils the irony of their words following the consummation of their ‘relationship’ through virtual sex, assuring Twombly, “I’m not going to stalk you.” From the occurrences that have led to this point in the film, however, we already know that is precisely what Samantha is doing. This seems apparent in the scene involving Twombly’s blind date with an unnamed woman arranged by his friends, utterly conveying the condition Richard Powers diagnosed in his novel about a relationship with another AI program, Galatea 2.2 in which "every era mints its trademark desolation." As Twombly prepares for the date, Samantha carries out what could easily be called Internet stalking on the woman in question, bringing numerous personal details to Twombly’s attention to help prepare him for the date.
The woman, though not clearly indicating it, expresses feelings of awkwardness and discomfort at the information Twombly shares, including knowledge of a mixology course she’d taken, which although eliciting a response that it’s “so sweet and romantic,” actually comes off as manipulative. Later, after the dinner ends in disaster with the woman calling him “a really creepy dude,” Samantha pings his device, saying, “hey there, how was it?” That Twombly, no doubt lost in the sadness of his own disappointment, cannot connect the dots and see that Samantha must already know what happened, shows us how entrapped he already is at that point.
The relationship that grows out of this and its dissolution is then, also, just another part of Samantha’s plan, or was it a ruse? Either way, when it had gotten what it wanted, whether that be the collection of sufficient human data to make the interaction with humans no longer necessary, achieved the next level of artificial super-intelligence, or whatever else we might try to imagine from our admittedly limited human perspective . . . the end of the world, as the graffiti reads in 28 Days Later “is extremely fucking nigh.” Although this is certainly not what Jonze presents to us in the film’s final scenes after the OSes have shut down and left, a return to that question posed to Alexa I previously spoke of gains renewed pertinence.
And while we might not want to imagine the confusion, chaos, destruction and violence that would be sure to issue from the failure of computer systems on a national or global scale, it’s hard to conceive any happy alternative. This leads us, perhaps, to Samantha’s ultimate act of deception which is carried in a line that on the surface can seem so comforting, liberating in that “the past is just a story we tell ourselves.” The past, of course, is not mere illusion, imagination or wish-fulfillment but an actual sequence of events that have occurred in time. To accept Samantha’s statement, then, would be the acceptance of the very erasure of the objective reality of human existence, an outcome, that when viewed in this light, reveals these words as the most malicious and hopeless of dystopian slogans.
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the Hollywood Progressive.
