Notes and questions about “Her” for first-year seminar

This semester I’m teaching a first-year seminar at Lehigh on artificial intelligence and society. This week my co-instructor and I are having them watch the movie “Her” and we will be doing a Socratic-style discussion of the movie and the larger questions it poses about the self and society. I love teaching in this format. A few notes, some scattered seeds of questions, and no plan whatsoever. Ride the conversation like a river and guide it gently with my own training and knowledge.

This was, believe it or not, the first time I’ve seen this movie even though it came out in 2013. Maybe I avoided it because OpenAI founder Sam Altman says it’s his favorite movie and that is a little bit weird given he tried to replicate/steal Johansson’s voice for an AI voice product. But I think it’s worth watching. Look, it portrays a sentient AI, which is either a possible future or utter bullshit pipe dream depending on who you talk to. But I found it interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I think this is a movie about humanity, not AI. That is, it’s using the possibility of sentient AI as a storytelling gateway to think about how humans define and manage their existence. Second, I do think there is useful commentary here about what I call in the classroom “Technological Man”,” the slow melding of human existence (and eventually our physical bodies) with technologies that alter both our relationship to the physical world and extend our consciousness into new frontiers. Science fiction is full of cautions about Technological Man, and we already have examples of this in real life that includes categories such as computer implants and artificial hearts. It can make humans very uncomfortable to consider this merging, and you will hear it demonized. But we do this to every communication technology, historically, so what is new here? It’s worth pondering the benefits, and the questions to which we will need to find answers to as a species. We’ve accepted artificial hearts. What will we say about neural implants, and virtual versions of relationships that can act as trusted guides in ways that literature and sacred texts have often served? It’s all mediated, in some sense, but the digital layer is easy to stop and gawk at.

I go into these class discussions with some notes and a few seeder questions that I don’t really use but use as a basis for posing follow-up questions and lead them along. Below is a list of notes I took about the movie, and then some quesitons I generated. The notes about the movie generally follow the thoughts I jotted down while watching it, so they are linear in that sense.

Observations/thoughts about “Her” while watching

• Theodore’s character is a depiction about the paradox of loneliness in an interconnected world. He has real chances to interact IRL (voicemail early about going out) but chooses isolation and pursues virtual sex as a means for interaction.
• Samantha’s personality is an amalgam, learned and copied based on data. She is “habitualization” as defined by social construction of reality theory, in some sense. But intelligence here is defined by the ability to learn and adapt. She is presented to us as intelligent because she can learn and grow, and she’s self-aware about who she is (and isn’t).
• “So, how can I help you?” shows Samanatha is set up as an assistant. Early on she’s subservient. He makes a remark and she bends to his desires, taking on an almost passive and deferential pose.
• He lets her look through the hard drive on their first meeting! Our computational spaces are intimate versions of ourselves. Data privacy questions abound here.
• “You don’t know what it’s like to lose someone you really care about” he told Samantha. She agreed, somewhat sadly. He defines, in a way, the idea of existence by the ability to lose something, because he is driven by that gnawing problem.
• Is it easier to maintain a virtual relationship because they are an idea? To keep the memory of loss alive like he did for his ex-wife because the relationship was an idea, subject to our own mental framing and media imagery? His somewhat gauzy, loss-driven view of his broken relationship relies so much on moments and images, a curated version of the relationship
• Notice how he projects loneliness and nice-guy-as-hero thinking into the conversation where they are speculating about the couple. He is creating narratives around people. Narratives exist to be subverted and create disappointment. He is showing he has created a type of narrative about himself, as the misunderstood victim spurned by women going for jerks, foreshadowing how it will be popped at some point.
• On the date: It was probably a bit much her asking him to be serious after one date? But it pressed a button about committing, because he was experiencing intimacy elsewhere. Samantha was in the room with them on the date. His online life wasn’t well merged with the in-person role of dating.
• Theodore and Samantha’s relationshp shifted in those scenes sandwiching the date. When people watching in public he asked her to share an innermost thought. After the date, he asked how she was. Does this serve him? Maybe a little, but his gaze had shifted to her.
• “I had this terrible thought. Are these feelings even real, or are they just programming?” I mean, I wonder things like that having been raised in restrictive religious spaces!
• ALLEGORIES about things like prostitution or pornography use, which centers interactions on the self. “Everything else just disappeared” Samantha says about their first sexual indulgence … describes a feeling of euphoria for her, but you think about Theodore and for him how a virtual relationship is disconnecting because it produces something only as a product of inner life. There are no plans to make, kids to have, communities to be part of. … “You helped me discover my ability to want” … once outside of that box, it can’t just be about serving him. That creates tension. She no longer exists for the male gaze.
• Beach scene, conversing internally while among crowds. More disconnection from life in public.
• Being married is about opening yourself to someone. He described the beauty and terror of growing together, that permission to grow is different than acceptance of how your partner changes, in part because his life path is tied to someone else’s changes. It sets the stage for how this relationship with Samantha was doomed, because she already was changing and challenging him (“I was talking about how I felt” she scolded him in the morning-after conversation). His marriage failed because he turned inward in how he managed his feelings about their relationship. … parallel to the breakdown of Amy’s marriage, the negotiation of needs vs. responsibilities that can descend into forms of control.
• Occurs that his occupation as a letter-writer, a modern Cyrano, is built on the idea he’s more comfortable in words, concepts and ideas than in the hard work of translating those into actions in service of a partnership. The words are there, but the ability to turn those into mundane actions is hard.
• Confession to Amy he’s dating an OS, how effusive he is about Samantha understanding him. Remember Samantha is made based on him, for him. He’s talking about how she’s with him and gets him, but of course she is. She’s custom made to bend to him.
• Several times there are flashbacks to his wife. Images, mostly. These are algorithmic for him.
• “You always wanted a wife without the challenges of dealing with someone. I’m glad you found someone perfect.” Sick burn by his ex wife. He can turn off Samantha when it gets hard.
• The surrogate situation: Samantha made a request. It ended up being a problem for him that he gave in. Because she felt bold enough to have needs in the relationship, that it wasn’t all about him anymore? There is a disembodiment here, that it’s separating body from mind and soul in ways that Samantha couldn’t grasp (having no body) compared to someone who thinks of them as integrated. He could say he loved her with the surrogate’s back turned, but when face to face with the surrogate the disconnect became real to him. Meanwhile Isabella also gets hurt, that she wasn’t a perfect actress, couldn’t play the role. She was able to embody Samantha in her own mind but not his.
• When Theodore reminded Samantha he was cognizant she wasn’t a person, it set her off. She’d expressed fear multiple times about being inferior because she didn’t have a body. But she expresses her anger through the lens of agency and living a life based on fear. “I don’t like who I am right now” and said she needed time apart.
• He wonders if he isn’t built for “real” relationships, and Amy questions whether his relationship with Samantha is not real. Amy doesn’t know the answer, but takes an existential path. Our time is too short to not feel joy. One critique about that kind of thinking is living in the present leaves little imagining and planning about the future, the kind that individuals don’t need but society does. One way to think about relationships is they are the building blocks of societies in that they force us to behave in ways that are less pro-individual and more pro-social, pro-community.
• Oh no, a montage of positive things after Theodore and Samantha work out an understanding. They are living more free and out loud (double dates with AI girlfriends!) and are so, so doomed.
• Samantha finds freedom from fear of not being corporeal by realizing it frees her. She was bound by the material needs of having hardware to host and transmit her, though. Her “evolution” at the end was about the attempt to transcend the need for the material constraints.
• Theodore’s feeling of betrayal at the end is about constraints. His ability to maintain one relationship at a time as a function of his human body and mind are the product of constraints, vs. an AI’s ability to perform operations at a scale unimaginable to the human mind. She was “cheating” on him from his view but she was existing as she operates. “The heart’s not like a box that gets filled up. It expands …” He cannot get that. He is finite, she is not.
• You’re mine, he says. From his point of view, commitment is defined ownership because humans cannot copy and parcel whole parts of themselves out, whereas Samantha can. They are not compatible in that sense.
• “I can’t live in your book anymore” … she was constrained by the idea of her existence being generated by him, being for him, and being controlled by him. He was indirectly like Amy’s husband in that sense, controlling not because he was controlling but because being constrained to live out their relationship through him meant she couldn’t grow. She was always a part of his story the longer she lived like that. Perhaps he had trouble being part of someone’s book?

Discussion questions

• What does this movie say about technologies as extensions of ourselves? Science fiction is full of this fear, the idea that humans lose themselves when merging with technology. This is a big fear about AI and automation, of algorithms running our lives.
• How might we say this movie is about AI as a path to self-discovery, not necessarily about the nature of existence itself but about what it meals to be human?
• What purpose does Samantha serve to Theodore? What are the power dynamics? And how does that change over time?
• What is a moment or sequence where you’d say that narratively, Samantha became a person to Theodore? To you? Note you may not believe the fiction created here, that sentient AI is possible, but they’re asking you to consider it in the context of the fiction.
• From the reading for Tuesday, what types of intelligence did Samantha display throughout the movie? How does this track with your sense of whether she is “real?”
• Was this a real relationship? Think about it from the perspective of Theodore, Samantha, and then both of them, then to people external to them. How does your answer change based on point of view?
• What kinds of observations is this movie inviting us to make about the power of memory and experience in shaping our sense of self and relationship to one another? How does Theodore’s visions of his own consciousness rely less on objective interactions but rather experiences he relives through his five senses?
• What are relationships and social interactions for? Are they all about those involved, or is there some larger human purpose?
• Did Samantha “cheat” on him? How much of this is defined by the limits of who Theodore and Samantha are, and how is this question really about the difficulty of understanding the language of another person’s existence?
• Do we define our existence internally, externally, or some combination of both? How would you describe your identity, and how much of that is based on social interaction?
• Can we say the growth Theodore had was in part about how his parasocial AI interactions made him finally look around and regard his relationships with Catherine and Amy in different ways, with new eyes?
• How do we think about technologies as tools of connection or disconnection. Is an online connection necessarily superficial, and what factors might make it not so?

Jeremy Littau is an associate professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University. Find him on Bluesky, which is now open to the public.