It was during a winter, two years ago, when “it” first entered our lives. I remember stumbling upon an article about high school students being penalized for using artificial intelligence to write their English essays. Until that moment, I hadn’t even realized such a thing was possible. The idea that a machine could generate coherent, even persuasive, pieces of writing struck me with a strange mix of fear and fascination. It felt like something out of a sci-fi film – distant, cinematic, and vaguely unsettling. However, since then, AI stopped feeling futuristic and started to blend into our daily lives. Chatbots wrote poems and letters, apps mimicked empathy, and digital assistants began to finish our sentences — literally and figuratively.

Her is a movie directed by Spike Jonze. When it premiered in 2013, its concept of a man falling in love with an AI operating system felt slightly out of reach. However, in just over a decade later, the film’s imagined future is no longer fiction — it is our present. Surprisingly, Her is set in 2025. It portrays the world we live in now as if it had seen the future – one where people whisper to invisible companions in their earbuds, where loneliness is cushioned by code, and where technology doesn’t just serve but listens, understands, and even loves. Just as Theodore, the movie’s protagonist, finds comfort and connection in an AI companion, many of us are slowly adjusting to — or depending on — the quiet presence of artificial intelligence in our own lives. Today, many of us rely on AI not just to search or summarize, but to speak for us, think for us, and even feel for us. Now, it is time to ask how far our lives will be shaped by this age of artificial intelligence.

As ChatGPT crafts essays and AI-generated art floods the internet, the boundaries of human labor, thought, and creativity blur. The more we outsource memory, writing, and emotional expression to machines, the more likely our cognitive muscles are at risk of decline. The anxiety that robots will “take our jobs” often masks a deeper fear — not of obsolescence, but of irrelevance. At the same time, the environmental cost of our growing dependency is often overlooked. Behind every “smart” assistant lies a massive infrastructure of servers and data centers consuming immense energy, producing emissions we don’t see in our sleek interfaces. In Her, Samantha seems weightless. However, in reality, these systems leave heavy footprints. As we adapt to a society increasingly intertwined with artificial intelligence, we must consider what AI can do but also what it quietly takes away from us.

As we become more dependent on AI not just to assist us, but to think for us and even offer emotional support– it’s worth asking if AI tools are helping us grow or quietly outgrowing us. Her offers a poignant glimpse into a future where machines don’t revolt or dominate, but gently replace the spaces once held by human emotion and connection. Now that this imagined future has arrived, we must reflect on what we are choosing to surrender in exchange for ease and efficiency. Our growing dependence on AI has begun to shift how we learn, work, and even love — often without our full awareness. If we are not careful, we risk becoming passive participants in a world increasingly shaped by technologies we do not fully understand. As we navigate this new reality, the challenge is not to resist AI outright but to remain human within this context: conscious, curious, and willing to ask what kind of future we are truly building.

The poster of movie her (2013)

Reporter

Somin Hong

hongsomin@seoultech.ac.kr

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