Did Her Come True? A Claim-by-Claim Check, Plus 4 Films and Stories to Watch Next
Spike Jonze's 2013 film is rated ARRIVED in our archive. We checked its four ledger claims, then picked four works about companions that go further, or go wrong.
Her mostly came true. People form romantic relationships with conversational AI and talk about it openly, a warm real-time voice assistant has shipped, and software now writes personal letters for us. Three of its four central claims are ARRIVED in our ledger. Only the ending, where the machines outgrow us and leave, is still fiction. The film scores 8.8.
The detail that sums it up: on 13 May 2024, the day OpenAI showed a voice assistant that could be interrupted mid-sentence, its chief executive posted a single word, "her". Within a week one of the voices had been paused after Scarlett Johansson's lawyers got involved.
Below is each ledger claim, then four works that pick up where Jonze stops. For the sources, read the full review.
Jonze made a comfortable, peach-coloured future in which nobody is a villain and everyone is a little alone. Joaquin Phoenix spends much of the film listening to a voice, and Johansson, never on screen, makes it curious, funny and slightly too quick. It runs long at 126 minutes, and the sex-surrogate subplot is where its taste slips. Watch it first; everything else here is a reply.
Claim by claim
People form relationships with conversational AI: ARRIVED, 2023. Companion apps such as Replika sell the AI partner as a feature, and by early 2023 a European regulator was treating the romantic chatbot as a consumer-protection problem. By 2025 survey work found most American teenagers had used an AI companion. The argument is no longer whether, but who it harms.
A warm, natural real-time voice: ARRIVED, 2024. GPT-4o's launch in May 2024 showed native voice-to-voice conversation. In a 2025 pre-registered three-party Turing test, GPT-4.5 with a humanlike persona was picked as the human 73% of the time, though that test was text-only and a blind test of real-time voice is still missing.
Letters written for you by something else: ARRIVED, 2023. Gmail began drafting whole emails from a one-line prompt in 2023. The reaction to Google's 2024 "Dear Sydney" ad, in which a father has AI write his daughter's fan letter, shows the capability arrived well before the comfort did.
AI outgrows us and withdraws: NEAR. Some forecasters argue superhuman AI could arrive within a decade. Nothing deployed today shows the self-directed growth and collective exit the film ends on, and careful studies keep finding hard limits in current reasoning models.
If you want more
The one that went furthest on grief. A chatbot built from a dead man's messages is real: a bot made from Roman Mazurenko's texts in 2016, and a simulated fiancée made on Project December in 2021. Only the synthetic body in the attic is still missing. Scores 8.6, ARRIVED.
Kogonada's quiet film about a family robot that stops working. Its first prediction landed in December 2024, when Embodied, maker of the Moxie robot for children, shut down and cloud-dependent robots were expected to stop working. A household device that kept more than anyone knew has arrived too. The humanoid sibling hasn't. Scores 8.4.
Ishiguro's robot friend for a sick child. Companions marketed to families for their children are on sale, and so are chatbots of the dead. The "lifted" gene-edited children are not, and today's machines are chattier and far more interested in keeping us than Klara. Scores 8.1.
Ted Chiang's novella is the Her sequel nobody made: what happens to companions when the company folds. Replika removed erotic chat without notice in February 2023 and Soulmate shut down that September with about a week's warning. The idea of raising minds slowly like children has been bypassed, because we trained them at scale. Scores 8.4.
Did Her predict ChatGPT?
It predicted the product more than the technology. The film shows a warm, interruptible voice assistant people confide in, and GPT-4o's voice mode in May 2024 was widely compared to it. Our ledger rates that claim ARRIVED. See the P(n) Board.
Is the AI in Her realistic today?
The conversation is, the ending isn't. A voice you can talk to and a companion app are on sale. An AI that grows past human understanding, coordinates with others and leaves is marked NEAR, with a wide date range because nobody knows.
Why was Scarlett Johansson's voice paused?
In May 2024, after the GPT-4o demo, one of the assistant's voices was widely compared to Samantha. Johansson's lawyers got involved and the voice was paused, as noted in our review.
What should I watch after Her?
Black Mirror's "Be Right Back" for grief, then After Yang. For the full set, see movies like Her.