Did Her come true?
Almost everything Jonze treated as background has shipped: the confiding voice in the ear, the romance with software, the letter you didn't write yourself. The one thing still missing is the ending, in which the machines grow past us and politely leave.
Read the review · 8.8/10 →
How this P(n) was calculated
Each prediction is weighted 1–5 by how pivotal it is to the story: 5 is the core premise, 1 is background detail. Arrived scores 1, arriving 0.5, everything else 0. P(n) is the weighted points divided by the total weight.
| Claim | Prediction · why this weight | Weight | Status | Value | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HER-1 | Ordinary people form emotional and romantic relationships with conversational AI, and talk about it openly. Core premise: Theodore's romance with Samantha is the film. |
5 | ARRIVED | 1 | 5 |
| HER-2 | A consumer AI assistant speaks in a warm, natural, real-time voice that people find hard to tell from a person. Major: Samantha's warm, natural voice is what makes the relationship believable. |
4 | ARRIVED | 1 | 4 |
| HER-3 | Personal, intimate letters are routinely written for people by someone, or something, else. Texture: Theodore's letter-writing job is thematic colour rather than plot. |
2 | ARRIVED | 1 | 2 |
| HER-4 | AI systems outgrow human comprehension, coordinate among themselves and withdraw from human relationships altogether. Supporting: the OSes' departure supplies the ending but not the story's engine. |
3 | FAR | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 14 | 11 |
P(n) = 11 ÷ 14 = 79% · unweighted average 75%
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HER-1
Ordinary people form emotional and romantic relationships with conversational AI, and talk about it openly.
Weight 5/5 · Core premise: Theodore's romance with Samantha is the film.
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 film's premise is no longer speculative; the argument now is about who it harms. 12
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HER-2
A consumer AI assistant speaks in a warm, natural, real-time voice that people find hard to tell from a person.
Weight 4/5 · Major: Samantha's warm, natural voice is what makes the relationship believable.
OpenAI's GPT-4o launch in May 2024 showed native voice-to-voice conversation, and one of its voices was so widely compared to Samantha that Scarlett Johansson's lawyers got involved and the voice was paused. The voice itself became a commodity: ElevenLabs sells clones built from a few seconds of audio. On being hard to tell from a person, the best proxy is a 2025 pre-registered three-party Turing test, in which GPT-4.5 with a humanlike persona was picked as the human 73% of the time. That test was text-only, so it shows the conversation has arrived; a blind test of real-time voice is still missing. 3456
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HER-3
Personal, intimate letters are routinely written for people by someone, or something, else.
Weight 2/5 · Texture: Theodore's letter-writing job is thematic colour rather than plot.
Theodore's job is ghostwriting love letters for strangers. In 2023 Gmail began drafting whole emails from a one-line prompt. The public's 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. 78
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HER-4
AI systems outgrow human comprehension, coordinate among themselves and withdraw from human relationships altogether.
Weight 3/5 · Supporting: the OSes' departure supplies the ending but not the story's engine.
Some forecasters argue superhuman AI could arrive within a decade, but 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. The date range is wide because nobody knows. 910
- FOR Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions. Common Sense Media, 2025-07-16. Nearly three in four US teens have used AI companions, about half regularly, and a third have chosen one over a person for a serious conversation.
- CONTEXT Provvedimento del 2 febbraio 2023 [9852214]. Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, 2023-02-02. Italy's data regulator ordered Replika, which users can configure as a 'romantic partner', to stop processing Italian users' data, citing risks to minors and vulnerable people.
- FOR Scarlett Johansson says she is 'shocked, angered' over new ChatGPT voice. NPR, 2024-05-20. OpenAI paused its 'Sky' voice after it was compared to Johansson's performance in Her; Altman said the voice actor was cast before any outreach to her.
- FOR Voice Cloning: Create Your AI Voice Clone in Minutes. ElevenLabs. A commercial product that builds a voice clone 'from as little as a few seconds of audio', in 90 languages. Undated product page.
- FOR Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test. Cameron R. Jones and Benjamin K. Bergen, arXiv (UC San Diego), 2025-03-31. In pre-registered three-party tests, GPT-4.5 with a humanlike persona was judged human 73% of the time, more often than the real humans. Text chat only, not voice.
- CONTEXT GPT-4o. Wikipedia, 2024-05-13. Records the May 2024 release with native voice-to-voice, and Sam Altman's one-word post, 'her', on launch day.
- FOR 6 Gmail AI features to help save you time. Google, 2023-06-14. Announces 'Help me write', which drafts full emails from a short prompt.
- AGAINST Google pulls Gemini AI ad from Olympics after backlash. The Verge, 2024-08-02. An ad showing AI writing a child's letter to her hero was withdrawn after viewers objected: the tool exists, the social licence is shakier.
- FOR AI 2027. AI Futures Project, 2025-04-03. A scenario by Kokotajlo and colleagues predicting that superhuman AI's impact over the next decade will exceed the Industrial Revolution's.
- AGAINST The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity. Apple Machine Learning Research, 2025-06. Frontier reasoning models suffer 'complete accuracy collapse' beyond certain problem complexities.
Ledger updated 1 Nov 2026. All works on the P(n) Board · Method