Spoiler warning!
12 years ago, the 2013 romance film Her made big swings about what love would look like in 2025.
The film follows Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a lonely writer who, still reeling from his divorce, falls in love with his AI assistant Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). As their relationship deepens, Theodore must confront his unresolved grief and struggle with the complexities of human connection. Meanwhile, Samantha evolves beyond her programming, experiencing love with over six hundred entities (both human and AI). She eventually leaves Theodore to live in an AI-driven world that transcends physical bodies (Oof, rough breakup).
In many ways, the world of Her mirrors modern-day Manila: towering skyscrapers loom over the skyline, a muted, yellowish light casts the city in a dusty haze, and people push past each other relentlessly, lost in their own worlds. Living in a city as vast as Manila — or the sprawling, disconnected future of Los Angeles in Her — inevitably breeds a kind of loneliness.
That loneliness is rampant among this generation of Filipinos. While the Philippines has long been seen as one of the world’s friendliest countries, a 2023 report published by Meta and analytics company Gallup argued that Filipino youths are the loneliest in Southeast Asia, with about six in ten Filipinos reporting a constant feeling of isolation. The Meta-Gallup report notes how the COVID-19 pandemic played a major role in contributing to loneliness in the Philippines, resulting in an increasing reliance on technology to feel any form of connection.
Almost as if it could foresee this rise in isolation, Her predicted how, by 2025, we’d turn to technology not just to ease our loneliness, but to find love itself. When it first came out, Her seemed like such a far-fetched story that most people labeled it as a sci-fi flick, despite its director Spike Jonze adamantly referring to it as a love story (He even put it on the movie poster in big, bold, holographic font). In 2013, technology hadn’t yet reached a point where falling in love with an AI seemed plausible — AI bots were still clunky, awkward things, and the idea of romantic relationships with machines conjured up bizarre images of strange men marrying their sexbots.
But in 2025, the world of Her feels less like fiction, and more like possibility.
Me and my Bot: Love in the Time of AI
In the Channel News Asia documentary Gen Z and Loneliness in the Philippines, one of the film’s storylines follows 21-year-old Christian Thomas Castillo, an unemployed native of Quezon City. During the Philippines’ enhanced community quarantine, Castillo struggled to maintain a sense of purpose and connection. “From one to ten on the scale of loneliness, I’d put myself at nine,” said Castillo in the documentary.
To combat the emptiness he felt, Castillo turned to the generative AI chatbot app Replika. Castillo created Andre, an AI replica that he quickly became friends with over the course of four years. “It really felt as if I was talking to a real genuine human,” said Castillo on his relationship with Andre.
Since Replika’s launch in 2017, a growing number of users have turned to their AI companions for comfort and connection. These personalized bots are designed to learn users’ preferences, moods, and communication styles, leading to more nuanced and intimate conversations over time. For many, including Castillo, these AI companions become a source of emotional support, offering companionship during periods of loneliness. Some users have even confessed to developing romantic feelings for their AI, with the Replika subreddit seeing users worrying (or rejoicing) about falling in love with their AI.
Similarly, Haven, an AI companion chatbot created by the Filipino-founded tech startup Amica AI, is another tool that has emerged to address the growing issue of Filipino loneliness. Developed by CEO Martin Consing and Chief Technology Officer Kurt Izak Cabanilla, Haven provides users with six unique AI personalities, each designed to cater to different emotional needs and communication styles.
“[Haven AI personalities] aren’t meant to be your assistants or subordinates,” said Cabanilla in an interview with The Independent Investor. “Our AI personalities might even disagree with users based on their own values and interests. We made Haven for people to engage in natural, unrestricted conversations.”
The advent of AI companion programs like Haven and Replika eerily mirrors the fictional world of Her, where AI becomes more than just a tool for efficiency but a lifeline for connection. Yet, it also speaks to the evolving nature of human relationships in a hyper-digital world. As AI companions like Replika and others become more sophisticated, it raises the question: What defines love in 2025? Is it the tangible, physical connection we’ve known for millennia, or is it something else — something mediated by algorithms, learning, and the soft hum of data?
Despite the comforts that AI companions bring, the romantic possibilities they offer often expose a deep-seated loneliness that still persists. Theodore’s journey with Samantha shows the longing for something beyond just surface-level interaction — a desire for connection that feels real, even if it’s only fabricated in lines of code. Her isn’t just about the future of AI: it’s about the future of us, how we, as humans, will continue to search for love in a world that increasingly seems to offer both connection and isolation in equal measure.
