I agree with you about it not being a dystopia but clearly it's a cautionary tale. The message I got from Her is not "Don't create the Torment Nexus" but "Touch Grass" or maybe "Don't force it." The narrator is profoundly socially alienated after his divorce. He's hung up on his ex-wife he's lonely, so he goes on all these dates with other people like Olivia Munn which are horribly awkward so he withdraws even further. Finally he finds Scarlett JohanssAIn and everything is perfect blah blah blah. But clearly it's not going to last as AI Scarlett clearly is in a different league and goes on to cheat on him and accelerate the singularity. He ends up with his awkward neighbor who isn't perfect and has her own skeletons but is more fundamentally compatible than other people he's been with.

I actually just read the Wikipedia article about the writing of the script and Spike Jonze has explicitly said he was inspired by the false allure of chatting with a chatbot. So clearly the intent of the work is in strict tension with the GPT-4o demo.

I'm honestly pretty puzzled by the tech CEOs constantly referencing fictional dystopias. I honestly cannot believe they're ignorant of the artistic intent of most of these works. I reread Snow Crash after the original Metaverse announcement and I kept thinking "Did he actually read this book?"

> Was I the only one who actually watched this movie? Her is not a dystopia.

I watched it, and it kind of was a dystopia. Not in the classic jackboots and oppression sense, but one of pervasive social disconnection and isolation. I mean, the main character's job was literally to write "heartfelt" letters to other people's loved ones on their behalf, because they couldn't be bothered to do it themselves.

The dystopia in the movie was not the AI, though. The dystopia was what made the AI appealing to the protagonist.

The scene where Joaquin has sex with a Her TaskRabbit was creepy and dystopian af IMO