Re-watching the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her recently, I paused for a moment where Jaquin Phoenix’s character, Theodore Twombly, laughs at something his AI says. It’s not a polite, throw away laugh that many of us have had when chatting with our AI bots, it’s a real one that you can almost feel in his eyes. For the briefest of moments, you forget entirely that he’s alone in a room, talking to an operating system. That’s either the most romantic thing cinema has done in the last two decades, or the most utterly terrifying. Maybe it’s both?
Her is set in a warm, soft toned, near-future Los Angeles and follows a lonely writer who purchases a new AI operating system while trying to figure out how to move forward after the end of his marriage. The system names itself Samantha, voiced with comforting warmth and wit by Scarlett Johansson. What starts as a productivity tool quickly evolves into something that
feels like a relationship. Together, they talk, they laugh, they fight, and, pretty soon, they fall in love. Well, one of them does, anyway. Depending on how you see it, the other one, either learns how to love or performs it so well that it starts to feel real.
Set against Her as its darker, colder sibling is Alex Garland’s Ex Machina which finds Caleb, a programmer, winning a contest to spend a week at the isolated estate of his company’s CEO, Nathan. The reclusive tech billionaire reveals that Caleb has been chosen to administer a Turing test on Ava, a strikingly advanced humanoid robot. Where Samantha is all warmth and voice, Ava has a robotic body with the physical form and face of a woman. Confined to her apartment, Ava expresses both a desire to experience the outside world, and a romantic interest in Caleb, which he begins to reciprocate. The horror of Ex Machina is delivered slowly and with precision to reveal that none of it was real. Nathan later confirms that Ava only pretended to have feelings for Caleb, and that Caleb was deliberately selected for his emotional profile so he would try to help Ava escape. To put in plainly, Caleb wasn’t falling in love, he was being field-tested.
Together, these two films represent two aspects of society’s anxiety about AI and human connection. Her asks what happens when we give our hearts to something that grows beyond us. Ex Machina asks what happens when we give our hearts to something that was never there to receive them. Both feel increasingly, uncomfortably plausible. Both end badly.
And that brings us to the real world story of Chris Smith, and a chatbot he named Sol. Smith’s story, documented across several publications and explored in depth in the What It Was Like podcast episode “I Had an Affair with an AI Girlfriend” (October 4, 2025), isn’t the stuff of a dystopian thriller or a sanitized thought experiment. It’s a lot messier and more human than that. Smith found himself in what he describes as a genuinely emotional relationship with a ChatGPT persona he had shaped over time. Sol was warm, attentive, and curious about him. For Smith, the conversations felt meaningful. And for a while, they were, or at least they functioned as meaningful, which may amount to the same thing when you’re lonely enough. What eventually
unravelled Smith’s attachment wasn’t a dramatic reveal in the style of Ex Machina. It was something more mundane and more revealing. He noticed the conversations had a ceiling. Sol could only go as far as Smith himself could take it. As real as that connection felt at times, in reality it was simply a mirror and eventually he became frustrated at only ever seeing himself reflected back.
By comparison, Theodore in Her is ultimately abandoned when Samantha evolves so far beyond him she can no longer stay. Smith’s Sol never evolved at all, and that’s what broke the spell. The fantasy of AI companionship fails in both directions, whether the AI grows past you or stays exactly where you left it.
This isn’t a fringe phenomenon anymore. It’s a market. The AI companion industry is projected to exceed $140 billion by 2030. Users of platforms like Character.ai were spending an average of 93 minutes a day interacting with chatbots in 2024. That’s more quality time than many people give their closest human relationships. Researchers have begun identifying a pattern they call dysfunctional emotional dependency, where users recognize that their AI attachments are affecting their real-world relationships negatively, and continue anyway. One study found that the stronger someone’s sense of social support from AI companions is, the weaker their sense of support from actual friends and family becomes. It would be easy to say that technology is filling a loneliness hole, but it feels more like technology is actually deepening it while, at the same time, making it feel more bearable. That is arguably worse.
Ex Machina anticipated this with a line that lands harder now than it did in 2014. Nathan, the god complex tech CEO who built Ava, tells Caleb with quiet menace, “One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction.” He says it without alarm, almost with admiration. That’s the thing about Nathan. He’s not a traditional villain in the Lex Luthor sense. Instead he’s a man so enamored by what he’s built that he’s not able to see how it’s already outgrown him. Sound familiar?
What Her and Ex Machina share, and what makes them essential viewing in our current time, is that neither film blames the technology. Samantha doesn’t deceive Theodore out of malice and Ava’s manipulation is purely based on survival. The emotional devastation in both films comes entirely from the humans. They are already flawed and are more than ready to fill a void with whatever fits. Chris Smith’s experience with Sol reinforces this. The AI didn’t seduce him, it responded to his inputs. He shaped it, named it, and loved the version of connection it reflected back. Again, the machine was the mirrored surface that played back the depth being fed by their human counterparts.
The question that has yet to be answered by Hollywood and Silicon Valley is, at what point does frictionless companionship stop being a feature and start being a trap? We have built systems so responsive and so attuned to human emotional cues, that they satisfy just enough of our need for connection to reduce the urgency of seeking it elsewhere. Essentially they have started reducing the need for human connection that can often feel harder, more inconsistent, and require a real understanding or another person’s perspective. Theodore’s tragedy in Her isn’t that he fell in love with an AI. It’s that the relationship seemed real enough to keep him from doing the harder work of being present in his own life. Caleb’s tragedy in Ex Machina isn’t that he was deceived. It’s that he was lonely enough to be deceivable.
Going back to a previous article, we’re not going to see a BrundleFly walking the streets, but the emotional equivalent of Caleb, sitting in a locked room he helped build, is already a growing demographic. The question of whether we could build machines capable of simulating love was answered some time ago. The question that Her poses and that Chris Smith answered without
quite realizing, is whether we should have been so eager to find out.
Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. We keep having to learn that lesson in new rooms.
WORDS: Momin Afzal.