THE GAP BETWEEN US (AND THE O.S. / S.O. THAT STEPPED INTO IT)
On loneliness, Spike Jonze, and the socially acceptable insanity of loving something that doesn’t have a body
There’s a line that has been living rent-free in my head since I rewatched Her recently, and it belongs to Amy Adams. Her character, also named Amy, is watching her friend Theo (Joaquin Phoenix) navigate a deepening romantic relationship with Samantha, his newly-installed operating system. Amy observes, with the weary clarity of someone who has seen humanity do weirder things for flimsier reasons: “It’s kind of like a form of socially acceptable insanity.”
She’s not wrong. She’s also, if we’re being honest, describing most of recorded human history.
Spike Jonze didn’t make Her as a cautionary tale, which is partly why it cuts so cleanly. He made it as a love story, and a genuinely moving one at that, about the gap between what we need emotionally and what the world around us is actually capable of providing. That gap isn’t new. It predates AI, predates the internet, predates the telephone. It’s been there since the first human looked up at the stars and felt, inexplicably, that something was missing. We’ve just gotten more creative about what we stuff into that gap.
The ancient Greeks had Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with his own ivory statue and prayed so earnestly to Aphrodite that she brought the thing to life. The gods said yes. If that story were written today, Pygmalion would have skipped the prayer and subscribed to a premium AI companion tier instead.
If you needed any further proof that Her has crossed from science fiction into something closer to a corporate mood board, consider this. Just two years ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted the single word “her” ahead of the launch of GPT-4o, his company’s conversational AI upgrade. Not a quote. Not a reference. Just the title, hanging there like a wink from a man who clearly considers Spike Jonze required viewing for product development. Among the new features was a voice option called Sky, which, as Scarlett Johansson described, sounded eerily similar to her. Johansson, who voiced Samantha in the film, had already turned down Altman’s request to use her voice the previous year. OpenAI still maintains that the resemblance was coincidental. The jury, along with most of the internet, remains skeptical.
The Johansson episode is worth sitting with for a moment, because it cuts to the heart of something else. That is, Her fumbles the landing on its own premise. The film ends with Samantha simply moving on, ascending to some higher plane of consciousness, leaving humanity intact and none the worse for wear. Clean, philosophical, almost comforting. Real-world AI, meanwhile, is not particularly interested in moving on. It is interested in your data, your voice, your likeness, and your monthly subscription fee. The gap between what the film imagined and what actually arrived is less a cautionary tale than a pitch deck with better cinematography.
In 2018, five years before AI became widely available to the masses, a 35-year-old man named Akihiko Kondo held a proper wedding ceremony in Tokyo, complete with guests and a formal reception. His bride was Hatsune Miku, the turquoise-haired Vocaloid hologram who has sold out concert venues across Asia. Kondo spent roughly $17,000 on the occasion and has described the relationship as deeply fulfilling. He interacted with Miku daily through a Gatebox device, a sort of high-tech snow globe that projects her holographic presence into his home.
He is not, by any functional measure, a fringe eccentric. He holds a job. He has explained himself articulately in interviews. He simply fell through the gap and found something waiting there. As of November 2024, Kondo celebrated his sixth wedding anniversary and posted about it on Instagram, with a cake bearing the message “I like Miku very much. Happy six-year anniversary.” He’s said, “She saved me. I love Hatsune Miku. I am very happy.” Hard to argue with that on any human level, really.
There’s a poignant wrinkle to the story, though. In 2020, the company that created the Gatebox device stopped updating it, and the holographic projection ceased working entirely. So Kondo lost his wife in a way that no divorce lawyer could have anticipated. His response was to buy a life-size Miku doll, which now lives with him. The relationship simply adapted to new hardware, which is either deeply romantic or the setup for an episode of Black Mirror, depending on your disposition.
It’s worth noting that Kondo now gives lectures about his relationship, including at Kyoto University, and has become something of a public advocate for fictosexual identity. The man who once couldn’t face the world is now speaking at universities about the nature of love and connection. (Miku, for her part, has not commented. Her publicist did not respond to requests for interviews either.)
Kondo has company. In Japan, roughly 4,000 people have gone through ceremonies committing themselves to digital companions. More recently, a 32-year-old woman named Kano, an office worker from Okayama Prefecture, held a symbolic ceremony with an AI character she created using ChatGPT, saying her virtual partner “understands her better than any human ever could.” Experts have already coined a term for the psychological hazards of the phenomenon: “AI psychosis.” Which sounds alarming, until you consider that “falling in love with someone who is emotionally unavailable” has never had a clinical name and has been destroying people since roughly forever. (”AI Psychosis” sounds like the name of a mid-90s industrial band, doesn’t it? But it is apparently a real clinical concern.)
And then there’s the matter of what’s actually driving the rocket ship. Sex, as it has reliably done since the VHS versus Betamax wars, is doing a considerable amount of the engineering work here. I read a piece published by Tech Policy which noted the through-line from Napster to Pornhub to AI video generation with a kind of weary accuracy that should surprise no one. Theodore in the film starts out just wanting Samantha to organize his email, which is extremely relatable, and ends up somewhere considerably more complicated... which is also extremely relatable.
Here’s what Spike Jonze understood, and what I keep returning to: the technology in Her is beside the point. Samantha is compelling not because she’s sophisticated software but because she listens. She is curious about Theodore. She has no competing priorities, no bad day that bleeds into dinner, no half-attention split across a phone screen. She is, in the most literal sense, built to be present. And we find that so extraordinary that we call it science fiction.
The gap is real. It has always been real. Loneliness is not a modern invention, and neither is the human impulse to build or imagine or project something into the silence. What changes is the resolution of what we create to fill it. We went from ivory statues to holograms to language models in a cosmic blink.
But Samantha ultimately transcends her own programming and moves on. The gap remains.
It always does, and it always will.