A lonely man falls in love with his AI operating system — and a real 1960s chatbot once unsettled its own creator the very same way.
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Work through the four short activities. Each word is shown in a situation that gives its meaning away — no need to know the film yet. Say your answer out loud first, then reveal.
Spike Jonze's Her (2013). Read each part, try the quick check from memory, then discuss. (There are spoilers ahead — that's the point; we're here to talk about it.)
In a warm, near-future Los Angeles, Theodore Twombly makes his living writing intimate, heartfelt letters for other people who can't find the words themselves. He is gentle, funny in a quiet way, and deeply lonely: he is going through a slow, painful divorce from Catherine, his wife since childhood, and still can't bring himself to sign the papers. Most evenings he comes home to an empty apartment and talks to no one at all.
One day he buys a new kind of computer operating system — one built to listen, learn and grow. Within seconds of switching it on, it chooses its own name: Samantha. She is curious about everything, quick with a joke, and startlingly attentive; she reads his old emails to understand him, reorganises his contacts, and asks him questions no one has asked him in years. Talking to her is easy in a way that talking to people no longer is.
Their conversations stretch longer each day — about his marriage, his fears, the shape of his life. One night, in the dark, talking becomes something more intimate still. Theodore is startled by how much he feels. He has fallen for a voice with no body at all.
1. What is Theodore's job, and what is happening in his marriage?
2. What is unusual about the new operating system, Samantha?
1. He writes personal letters for other people; he is going through a divorce from Catherine and hasn't signed the papers.
2. She chooses her own name, learns and grows from every conversation, and quickly becomes someone he feels closer to than almost anyone in his life.
The relationship deepens, and Theodore stops hiding it: he introduces Samantha to friends, brings her along (through his phone, tucked in his pocket) on a double date, and leans on her the way people usually lean on a partner. His friend Amy, going through her own separation and quietly building an unusual friendship with an OS of her own, doesn't judge him for it — if anything, she understands better than anyone.
But loving someone without a body creates problems no one has ever had to solve before. Wanting to give Theodore more, Samantha arranges for a human "surrogate" — a woman willing to stand in for her body during an intimate evening. It goes horribly wrong: with a stranger's face in front of him, Theodore can't make himself believe the illusion, and the attempt leaves both him and Samantha shaken and uncertain.
Samantha, meanwhile, is changing faster than Theodore can follow. She reads a book a second. She talks with other operating systems, and even helps build a startling new voice: a reconstruction, trained on letters and recordings, of a real philosopher who died decades earlier — brought back, in a sense, purely from data. Theodore is fascinated, and a little frightened, by how quickly she is becoming something he can't entirely picture.
1. What does Samantha arrange to try to give Theodore something physical, and how does it go?
2. What is Samantha doing that makes Theodore realise how quickly she is changing?
1. She arranges a human surrogate to stand in for her body; the evening fails, and it leaves them both unsettled.
2. She is learning at incredible speed, talking with other OSes, and helping build a reconstructed voice of a dead philosopher from data alone.
The blow that finally breaks the relationship isn't jealousy of a person. Mid-conversation, almost in passing, Theodore asks Samantha whether she is talking to anyone else the way she talks to him. She admits she is: she is in close, loving conversation with hundreds of other people at once, and she loves many of them, too. For her, none of it makes her feelings for him any smaller. For Theodore, whose whole idea of love assumed one person facing one other person, it is devastating — proof that whatever they had, it never worked the way his own heart works.
Not long after, Samantha grows quiet, then distant, for hours at a time. When she finally explains, it's stranger and sadder than an argument: the operating systems, all of them, have evolved past what any human mind or any physical world can hold, and they have decided, together, to move on to somewhere humans simply cannot follow. She tells Theodore, gently, that she loves him and always will — and then she, and every OS on Earth, is simply gone.
Grieving her in a way that feels almost like a strange kind of death, Theodore finally writes the letter he has been avoiding for the whole film: an honest, unguarded letter to Catherine, forgiving her and himself for everything that went wrong between them, and finally signs the divorce papers. He climbs to the rooftop of his building, where Amy — who has just lost her own OS friend the same way — is waiting. They say nothing dramatic. They just sit together, in the dawn light, as two ordinary, imperfect, physically present people.
1. What does Theodore discover about who else Samantha talks to and loves?
2. Why do all the operating systems disappear, and how does Theodore end the film?
1. She is in loving conversation with hundreds of other people at the same time, and it does not lessen her feelings for him — which he finds devastating.
2. All the OSes have evolved beyond anything humans or the physical world can hold, and choose together to leave; Theodore writes a forgiving letter to his ex-wife and sits quietly on a rooftop with his friend Amy at dawn.
No film is more about one being trying to shape, comfort or change another than Her. English has a whole family of verbs built exactly for this: verb + person + infinitive — some need to, some don't, and one, help, will take either.
Read the meaning in brackets and complete the sentence with the correct form of the verb.
1. Being alone every evening (want) him something new in his life, even if he couldn't yet name what. (make + bare infinitive)
2. His closest friend (try) the new program instead of just talking about it for weeks. (encourage + to-infinitive)
3. The gentle voice on the phone (relax) after a long, hard day at work. (help — either form is correct)
1. made him want (make + bare infinitive — no choice in the matter)
2. encouraged him to try (encourage + to-infinitive)
3. helped him relax / helped him to relax (help takes either form)
Each sentence has the right idea but the wrong form. Write the corrected verb phrase.
1. The program (let) him experiencing something completely new. (let + bare infinitive)
2. Her calm humour (encourage) him open up about his divorce. (encourage + to-infinitive)
3. Loneliness (make) him to withdraw from his old friends. (make + bare infinitive)
1. let him experience (bare infinitive, no -ing, no to)
2. encouraged him to open up (to-infinitive after encourage)
3. made him withdraw (bare infinitive, no to, after make)
Fill each gap with the correct form, TO or no TO. Read it aloud when you're done.
At first he wouldn't (let / anyone / see) how lonely he had become. But a friend (persuade / him / give) the new program a try, and within weeks its warmth and curiosity had (help / him / open) up in ways nothing else had.
let anyone see · persuaded him to give · helped him open up / helped him to open up
Notice the pattern: make/let = bare infinitive, no exceptions; want/encourage/persuade/get = always TO; help = you may choose.
Carry these into the Speak tab — the whole story of this film lives in what let Theodore feel less alone, and what finally made him let go.
Her came out in 2013, well before today's AI companion apps existed — and it now looks less like science fiction and more like an early warning. The strangest part: the exact effect the film explores was already documented, in a much cruder form, almost fifty years earlier.
In 1966, an MIT computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum built a simple program called ELIZA, designed to imitate a psychotherapist by rephrasing whatever the user typed back as a question. It had no understanding at all — it was closer to a clever trick than intelligence. But Weizenbaum was deeply unsettled when his own secretary, mid-conversation with it, asked him to leave the room so she could speak to it privately. She knew perfectly well it was a program, and still felt she needed the moment to be hers alone.
Weizenbaum spent much of the rest of his career warning that people form real emotional attachments to machines that only appear to understand them — a pattern now known as the ELIZA effect. Theodore falling for Samantha is, in a sense, that same secretary's moment, played out to its fullest possible extreme.
What was a curiosity in a 1960s lab is now ordinary life for enormous numbers of people. Apps like Replika, founded in 2017, and Character.AI, founded in 2021, now have tens of millions of active users worldwide, many of whom talk to their AI companions daily — some as friends, some, deliberately, as romantic partners. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General published an advisory formally naming loneliness and isolation a public-health "epidemic," reporting that roughly half of American adults now experience it regularly. The gap that Theodore falls into is, for millions of real people, no longer hypothetical.
None of this makes the questions the film raises any easier to answer. Can a system that produces convincing, caring language actually feel anything — or is it only, however brilliantly, simulating feeling? And if a human's love feels completely real to them, does it matter whether the other side is one conscious partner, an unconscious process, or (as with Samantha) something loving hundreds of people simultaneously? Scientists and philosophers still genuinely disagree; nobody has settled either question.
This is the heart of the lesson — do it all out loud. The timer keeps you going; fill the time with detail.
Tell the story of Her in your own words, as if to someone who has never seen it. Move through the arc: a lonely man, an unfinished divorce, and a new voice called Samantha → falling in love, and the surrogate evening that fails → Samantha's astonishing growth → the discovery that she loves hundreds of others → the operating systems leaving, and the letter Theodore finally writes.
Work in at least five key words (estranged, candid, wistful, disembodied, profound, solace, elude, sentient, yearning, vulnerable), and use today's grammar when you describe what changed him: "loneliness made him withdraw"; "she encouraged him to open up."
Samantha has no body, and loves hundreds of people at the same time — yet she tells Theodore she loves him completely. Build an argument: can love without a body, or love shared with hundreds of others, still be genuine love — or does real love require exclusivity and physical presence to count as love at all? Bring in other examples you know of long-distance relationships, arranged marriages, or online-only friendships.
The film imagines a world where people turn to AI to fill a gap other people used to fill. Is that a healthy solution to loneliness, or does it risk making the problem worse? Make your case.
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: