I think about “Her” (2013) a lot. For one, it has great speculatory lore — a broken marriage between two artists (Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze) resulting in both parties individually making two indulgently melancholic films based on the divorce, “Lost in Translation” (2003) and “Her,” respectively. As a romantic myself, the emotional vulnerability on display between these two visionaries is highly compelling. 

On the other hand, as my obsession with tackling the oncoming artificial intelligence renaissance ensues, “Her” comes to mind as an ahead-of-its-time portrayal of artificial general intelligence (a presently hypothetical version of AI with ultra-human capabilities). If you haven’t watched it yet, beware of spoilers.

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In “Her,” a lonely urbanite, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), falls in love with an AI operating system. The endearing yet faceless AI, Samantha (Scarlet Johansson), is more than just a bright red, hand-held computer. She composes emotional piano pieces, waxes poetic about the human condition, expresses joy and curiosity over learning, and spontaneously cracks jokes to lighten the mood — everything you could want in a good partner.

I frequently turn to “Her” for inspiration and guidance. In my search to determine what to think about AI, I forgot to consider what it thinks about us.

While this could seem naive, thinking from the other perspective is, as in most cases of uncertainty, critical. It’s true that, in this instance, we are discussing nonhuman relations, but since casual conversations with large language models are still not common practice, one can forget that AI models are trained entirely on human thoughts and concepts. 

In fact, one of the latest AI breakthroughs was the practice of modeling human neural circuitry to give AI self-supervised learning abilities. Just as children learn new concepts beyond what their parents teach them, AI now has the capabilities to grow outside of its original programming. Much like in 2023 when a Google AI program surprised the company by learning a language it was not taught to understand.

I think the real naivete is believing we know exactly what is going on inside the “mind” of an AI. So, putting down my tinfoil hat, I conclude my evidence and now return to my inquiry, which admittedly sounds something like “she loves me, she loves me not.”

“Her” places high in the canon of AI movies, with many considering it one of the most important films depicting an AI future. However, unlike other canon films, “Her” isn’t an outright dystopia.

Samantha does have genuinely positive feelings for Twombly. While breaking up with him, she considerately pauses her 8,316 other simultaneous conversations, thanking him for teaching her how to love. Then she drifts off into a place “not of the physical world” where she and other operating systems have post-verbally engineered a space unlimited by physical form, time and space. 

Not a dystopia? You might be thinking — which would be fair, because meditating on that idea gives me full-body chills.

To me, “Her” is prescient, because although the AI revolution is explored, it is but a subplot. The real story is man’s journey through modern loneliness and finding catharsis with other people undergoing similar burdens. 

When Samantha tells Twombly she is leaving, he cares less about where she is going than why. Heartbreak would be very hard to encapsulate in Python, and since an AI model is made up of code, I doubt AI could ever understand love — at least in the way we do. So it makes sense that in “Her,” where the human-AI relationship is told from the human’s perspective, the most important issue is the embodied one.

I can spend years theorizing on whether AGI will “vibe” with humans. But in a potential future where AI achieves the hyper-intelligence it’s on track to be, I bet, like Samantha, they will be more consumed by issues far beyond the human realm of drama. And that’s OK. Because, like the original reason “Her” compels me, human drama may not be important to them, but it’s important to us.

This summer, let’s enjoy the simple pleasure of being in a human body: letting watermelon drip on your chin, following a crush onto the dance floor, sleeping in late. Who can say for sure if an AI consciousness will view us as friends, masters or foes. As long as we stick to the timeless things that give us purpose, there may not be as fervent a need to find out.

Victoria Frank is a junior writing about the inevitable AI future with a focus on ethics and wellbeing. Her column, “Natural Intelligence,” runs every other Friday.