Filmmaker Spike Jonze provided a near-prophetic vision of the future with his 2013 sci-fi romance Her, in which a very lonely and increasingly withdrawn man gradually falls in love with an artificial intelligence operating system that he converses with via voice command. More than a decade later, life has (kind of) imitated art, and Jonze is worried about its dangers. Besides becoming a modern cult classic meditation on loneliness and the inherently human need for intimacy, Her has also arguably been a source of inspiration for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman famously referenced the movie on X when announcing GPT-4o, the chatbot model that would later find itself at the center of several AI psychosis and addiction controversies due to its sycophantic tendencies. The company even debuted the chatbot with a new voice that was allegedly based without consent on Scarlett Johansson, who voiced the AI system in Jonze’s movie.
After ChatGPT blew up in popularity and catapulted AI chatbots into everyday life, Jonze says the comparisons to his movie swiftly followed. In a conversation at vibe-coding company Replit’s Vibecon conference in New York City on Wednesday, the writer-director talked about the awkwardness of people complimenting the “incredible user interface” he came up with for Johansson’s character, Samantha. He says the movie is less about technology and more about relationships and intimacy, so he wanted the audience to feel that the chatbot had autonomy, which differs from the technology we are dealing with right now.
