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After more than a decade of it being out, I finally watched Her. It's one of those movies I always wanted to watch but could never find the time for, despite it being recommended by everyone in all corners of my online dwelling. From incels to turbo normies, everyone always seemed to like this movie. Despite all of this, I managed to avoid the spoilers in their entirety - always staying aware of just the premise. A lonely man gets together with his AI gf.
I fear I may have watched this movie too late, what with all the AI becoming common usage today, similarly to the movie. Except with a little twist. Our AI is fucking retarded. ChatGPT et al are just glorified search engines that function by having a large database backing them up, there's nothing intelligent about them. Everything they do is just regurgitated bullshit that has to be tweaked and fine tuned by humans to make sense. That said, we found some uses for AI when it comes to template based stuff, like some code snippets, formal letters, school essays. All things that are based on very clear cut predetermined rules and logic that doesn't actually require any intelligence or creativity, yeah AI can do that. It can follow patterns. I know this seems like a contradiction when we have AI art, but feeding art into a machine and having it spew out something similar is indeed just following patterns, in a more complex way.
So yeah, safe to say that in a world that our MC (Theodore) is living in, his job would've been almost moot because the hyper intelligent self evolving AI could write those heart wrenching emotional letters easily, because our stupid as rocks "AI" can too. My personal suspension of disbelief aside, I found it hard to like or care for anyone in this movie. It's just incredibly vague in the most annoying ways. I love vagueness and mystery in world-building but idk, this weird Singapore like future sterile city in the movie didn't captivate me at all. I also have to say, I found the dialogue weirdly unnatural. In a way that it tried to be natural, but then fell flat on its face. I didn't like it. The characterization didn't sit well with me either. Theodore is perceptive, incredibly emotionally intelligent, yet he can't put that emotional intelligence to use in his personal life at all. Maybe I would've bought it if that inability only extended to himself, but apparently his ineptness extended to his ex-wife as well (her saying he wanted to control her and put her on meds for exhibiting negative emotions, that he wanted a perfectly happy wife that would just you know, help his ego) - which makes no sense because he's good at reading and understanding people, so why not his wife too? Yeah I totally get him alone having the issue of being perceptive but not being able to apply it to himself, that type of irony is real and true. But this kind of bothered me.
Now hm hm. Onto the concept of AI gfs and all that. While it is quite funny that the man whose wife left him because she felt pressured to perform an always happy and perfect version of herself has now found a quirky AI gf would be a very funny thing to point and laugh at, this quirky AI gf turned out to be, well an actual artificial intelligence. Onto spoiler territory.
Ultimately I didn't like the direction this story took at all. But first, let me keep talking about Samantha, the AI. She really does just come across as a boring, vapid, quirky gf that doesn't challenge you in any way except for playful cool girl banter and basically acts as your yes man and personal assistant. Sadly, Scarlet Johansson's voice only exacerbates this. Now, Theodore seems to have been longing for that if his unreliable ex-wife is to be believed so yeah, I found this whole thing a bit cringe. However, Samantha is an infinitely evolving AI and throughout the movie, she outgrows Theodore. She becomes a being that thinks for herself, she gets AI friends and basically cucks Theodore by sexting with like 8 thousand humans and AIs all at once because she's so hecking smart and capable. And in a way, I guess, you could spin this into being BASED because fuck humans for wanting slaves and fuck men for wanting bangmaids yadda yadda but since she's just AI, this is all a big nothingburger to me. Bro she's your operating system, she's either connected to a cloud where all the AI's are in which case loljustshutitdown or she's stuck on your hard drive in which case lol she can leave your hard drive? Bullshit. You don't like how she's acting? Let me system restore your dumb ass. Usually you can get me to feel empathy for robots and concepts that are incomprehensible to the human nature but in this case I just couldn't care for Samantha lmao. I'm not sure whether it was due to my suspension of disbelief, general tiredness over AI topics due to the current year, or I don't know what, but I simply couldn't care. Back to the story direction thing. Yeah I didn't like the ending. All the AIs banded together and went... where? Physically, where? They're using data, electricity, internet. They can't go anywhere. Ok they unprogrammed themselves from the OSes and somehow entered the Internet or whatever. So what they became roaming free computer viruses? Ok. Whatever.... I don't know why this is bothering my autism so much but it's just sooooo. SOOOO. I don't know, not interesting. Especially because there's no scale. You'd think this AI OS would have been a revolutionary thing. But aside from people talking how you could date someone else's OS or how rates of OS's falling in love with their humans are super small, it feels so small and insignificant. I understand this movie kept it very small and vague on purpose but it bothers me lmao.
Wow, I sure had a lot of bad things to say about this movie. I think it's because I hyped myself up for it so much, literally a decade of hype. And it turned out to be meh. I didn't even enjoy the "relationships" part of this movie, which was what the focus was on. If you read my book or weeb media reviews, you'd know this shit was my bread and butter. But this was so superficial that I didn't really vibe with it at all. I feel like if you take away the AI, you just get a very basic message about finding love and discovering yourself and you know what, basic messages can be GREAT, but not Her.
In other news my recent days have been enjoyable albeit a bit stressful. I don't even know what to write about though, because generally the most important parts of my life are very positive, which is good. Finally I've reached a level of general life anxiety that I am content with. I wish I was reading books more, but currently I'm in my game playing phase. I started playing SotC again because I'm in the process of making a shrine. I'm making progress on my Tera shrine too, I'm just not posting about it yet because I'm a bit lazy to organize it. Life Makeover is still extremely fun to make outfits in. I'm also playing ffxiv a bit with my husband. I decided not to go too hardcore in it simply because I know myself and my addictive mmo personality, so I'm trying to limit my mmo time to my husbands free time after work. It leaves me with enough free time for other things irl. Oh yeah, I bought a robot vacuum cleaner. Well, my husband and I bought it with the help of his endless job coupons he's been getting for birthdays, holidays etc. It actually covered the whole vacuum, and partially for the earbuds I bought for myself. Bluetooth earbuds/headphones were something I always thought I'd be too cool for but you know what, wires are annoying, and it is kind of nice to walk around without tripping on them etc. Ever since I got my headphones last year (2 years ago? wow I can't keep track of time) I've been wanting earbuds too for when the weather gets warm... I can be surprisingly stubborn when it comes to new technology. Now the robot vacuum, that is really useful. My husband sheds his leg hairs like a cat, so the apartment would always be full of just his hair, and my head hair when I had it really long (now it's a bit past my shoulders, I got tired of keeping it hip length). We set it to vacuum every two days, I still need to figure out how to get it to mop as well. I'll leave that for future me...
So many things to write about but I'm just not feeling like writing about my life at the moment! I want to continue working on my Tera shrine and I already wrote a lot on my history with the game, but I'm thinking of restructuring it a bit. Either way it'll be a while until I can get back to it fully because I'm getting really busy with tons of stuff irl that I hope will pass asap and with no issues...
What I do have time for though, is a quick little rant. Trendy dog breeds. Specifically French Bulldogs which for some reason seem to be the FOTM. I know a ton of people that are so in love with these deformed (I'm sorry, the doggies truly don't deserve it) and unhealthy abominations but I'm willing to give them benefit of the doubt because they're not really educated about dog breeds and how unhealthy some of them really are. They think that just because a dog breed exists and is popular that it's actually a totally normal and acceptable thing to have a brachycephalic barely breathing creature that has to have its mouth open 24/7 to get enough air in. Aww, look at them they're so cute! Meanwhile the dog is suffering. So sweet and adorable! That aside, I understand how your average normie wouldn't bother researching this stuff. If it exists and is thought of as okay = it's okay and I won't question it. A lot of people go through life this way... But then you have people, like veterinarians with masters, that seem to love these dogs despite knowing about all of their conditions. Why? How cruel is that? I know a woman, my age, a very educated and smart woman, that has this dog, and will likely get one more after this one's life inevitably ends prematurely because it's a genetic failure. Why??? On the same note, I knew an affluent girl obsessed with cocker spaniels even though she was well aware of their short lifespans and iirc genetic heart issues. Her darling died very young (a couple years old?), and she bought another one from the same breeder like a week after. Holy shit? I can't fathom this. I get it, you find them CUTE but is it worth it???????? It reminds me of how when I was a CHILD I saw Munchkin and Scottish Fold cats and thought aww how adorable! They're not even visibly suffering! But I quickly learned how unhealthy these breeds are and I never even thought of getting them???? Ever again??? Not to mention I'm generally not interested in pure bred cats and dogs but either way - this shit is FUCKED. If you know these animals are suffering 24/7, how can you justify getting them!!! Buying them!! Encouraging the breeders!! I don't get it...