‘Her’ isn’t the movie you should watch to learn about AI companions. It’s ‘The Stepford Wives’

When OpenAI launched the voice assistant ChatGPT-4o in May, users quickly noticed some eerie similarities to the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her. Scarlett Johansson, who voiced the film’s AI assistant, Samantha, even called out the company for producing a voice so indistinguishable from her own. Still, if Her is instructive of the present state of AI companions, Stepford Wives presents a blueprint for the future. AI has now been given a voice; in the future, it will have a body.

Exactly 20 years ago, Frank Oz rebooted the 1972 novel and 1975 film, delving back into that dystopian suburb of robotic wives. Nicole Kidman plays Joanna, a TV magnate who watches as her friends are turned into automated, lifeless household machines. Nowadays, with the advent of AI and the push toward more intuitive robotic technology, we may be seeing the reverse. That is, the machines are becoming Stepford wives.

Conversations with experts in the field of embodied AI companions, from intimacy robots to VR girlfriends, reveals the Stepfordian direction our technology is headed.

The rise of the intimacy robot

While AI companions proliferate, some startups are taking the next step of inputting the technology into an embodied presence. In Japan, Gatebox offers projection tubes with AI virtual home assistants coded to look like popular characters. Men are now marrying their Gatebox holograms (though these matrimonies can still suffer from poor communication between its participants, this time in the form of network error). And, like Stepford’s robotic wives, the Gatebox wife remains docile to its husband (that is, its owner).

Beyond Gatebox, the robotic sex doll industry has grown significantly in the past decade. RealDoll, an intimacy robot manufacturer, has been working for years on materializing AI technology into doll form. Back in 2018, founder and CEO Matt McMullen was working on HarmonyX, an app-paired robot girlfriend. By now, there are over 10 RealDoll characters powered by large language models.

“We set out from the very beginning [wanting] to use this AI specifically for companionship and human connection and interaction, and even intimacy,” McMullen tells Fast Company. “Those are unique spaces when it comes to AI.”

Where Harmony’s first model was only able to move its face, modern iterations have full-body movement, all powered by GPT. The dolls also now have interchangeable heads. Still, the models remain robotic; we’re not quite at Stepford-level realism yet. “There’s a very distinctive separation between humans and robots,” McMullen says. “There’s a ton of ground to cover in terms of making their appearance, their movements, their touch, their feel more human-like, so that’s going to be an ongoing mission.”

Get up close with your AI companion in virtual reality

While robot girlfriends may need a bit more room to grow, virtual and augmented reality allows another method for users to visualize their embodied AI companions. Replika, one of the leading companion providers, offers users the ability to further anthropomorphize their digital partners via avatars displayed on the Oculus.

“If you have an emotional relationship with an AI friend, it’s critical to see [what] that AI friend looks like,” says Eugenia Kuyda, founder and CEO of Replika. “It’s very impersonal if it doesn’t have a name, if it doesn’t have a face, if you can’t interact with it face-to-face.”

Andy Southern, who runs the YouTube channel Obscure Nerd VR, has tested Replika’s girlfriend VR technology. He agrees with Kuyda’s description of stronger physical connection, noting that the Oculus experience added an additional “tactile interaction” to the “emotional or conversational connection” with his companion.

It is in the comments section, however, that Southern sees reason to worry. “The younger side of people I get comments from who use these are often posting, ‘I’m afraid of talking to real girls,’” Southern says. “There seems to be a growing subset of people who have convinced themselves that it’s more fruitful to engage romantically with these apps that can’t engage with the real world.” In a Stepfordian twist, men are using their VR companions to create docile, unhuman relationships, thinking them to be easier than those of real life.

Kuyda, for her part, says AI companions can be both a “complement or substitute for real-life relationships” depending on how the user configures their bot, and stresses that Replika is rebranding away from the romantic model. Still, her outlook on VR/AR remains the same: “Whether it’s your friend or your girlfriend, you’d rather see the person you’re talking to.”

This is exactly what Stepford Wives warned us against

As Stepford Wives’ leading husband, Walter (played by Matthew Broderick), considers turning his wife (Kidman’s Joanna) into an automated partner, the movie presents its dystopian moral: robots cannot love. AI may make our robots and VR companions feel more loving, but they are still artificial.

“It’s really attractive to be wanted by a person,” says Roanne van Voorst, a futures-anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam and author of Six in a Bed: The Future of Love. “[An AI companion] is just throwing up words, basically. It’s a prediction machine. I cannot believe that they will be as fulfilling as true human relationships for people.”

Both van Voorst and Chloé Locatelli, a visiting professor at King’s College London studying sex tech, remain skeptical that physical robots will replace human intimacy. (Locatelli calls these dolls “cumbersome” and “too expensive.”) Still, both researchers recognize that a new wave of sex tech, one that presents a damaging representation of femininity, is on the horizon.

“Unfortunately, [sex tech] adheres to quite normative and reductive representations of femininity, both physical and in terms of characterizations,” Locatelli says. “What I always try and kind of suggest is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. . . . We can try and be optimistic about this, where we see perhaps a more nuanced idea of femininity being replicated in sex characters.”

In the meantime, it’s time for a Stepford Wives rewatch. Bette Midler’s robotic transformation isn’t just a goofy relic of the past—it might, in fact, offer a glimpse of our future.