AI in Pop Culture: From Her to Blade Runner

Why fiction got here before the technology did

Long before any of the 129 platforms I test today existed, film and television had already spent decades exploring what it might mean to fall for an artificial mind. That's not a coincidence. Storytellers are drawn to the emotional and ethical questions an AI companion raises (what does it mean to be loved back by something that might not "feel" the way we do, what do we owe a mind we built) regardless of whether the underlying technology to build one actually exists yet. Fiction got to ask those questions decades before consumer AI companion apps could actually attempt to answer them.

That head start matters for understanding today's real category. Almost everyone approaching an AI girlfriend app for the first time already has a mental model of what one "should" be, shaped by a handful of very influential films and shows, not by any actual hands-on experience. Understanding those cultural reference points is genuinely useful context for understanding both the appeal and the skepticism real platforms run into.

A myth that predates computers by thousands of years

The idea of falling in love with something you created yourself is much older than any of this. The ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he carved, is often cited as the earliest version of this exact emotional premise: a creator falling for their own creation, brought to life. Every modern story about a person falling for an artificial companion is, in a real sense, a variation on that same several-thousand-year-old idea, just with silicon and software standing in for marble.

I think that's a useful reminder that the emotional core of this story isn't actually about AI at all. It's about a much older, more universal question: can something we build and shape ourselves genuinely love us back, and does it matter if it can't. Modern AI just happens to be the version of "something we built" that's actually arrived in most people's real lives.

"Her": the film that became shorthand for this entire category

Spike Jonze's Her (2013) is probably the single most referenced film in any conversation about AI companionship, and for good reason. Joaquin Phoenix's character falls in love with Samantha, an AI operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson, and the film treats that relationship with genuine emotional seriousness rather than as a joke or a warning. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, which reflects how seriously it was taken as a piece of storytelling, not just as a novelty premise.

What Her got right, in my opinion, is the emotional logic of why someone would form a real attachment to an AI companion in the first place: attentiveness, being genuinely listened to, a relationship that adapts to you specifically rather than asking you to adapt to it. That's the same emotional appeal I hear described by real users of real AI companion apps, even though the actual technology Samantha represents (a seamless, always-available, perfectly attentive voice) is still well beyond what any of the 129 platforms I test can currently deliver, given that voice interaction averages just 1.81 out of 5 industry-wide today.

Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049: AI companionship as a product, not just a person

Blade Runner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick's novel, approaches this from a different angle: Rachael, a bioengineered replicant, becomes a genuine romantic interest for the human protagonist, and the film uses that relationship to ask uncomfortable questions about what actually separates an artificial mind from a human one, if the artificial one doesn't even know it's artificial.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017) pushes this even further with Joi, an AI companion explicitly sold and marketed in-universe as a personalized product you subscribe to, projected as a hologram rather than embodied at all. Joi is, in a lot of ways, the closest thing pop culture has to depicting an actual AI girlfriend app rather than a general AI that happens to fall in love. That framing, AI companionship explicitly as a commercial product rather than an emergent relationship, is a genuinely prescient detail given how real platforms today are, in fact, subscription products competing on price and features, not just characters in a story.

Ex Machina and the harder, more skeptical version of this question

Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2014) takes a more skeptical, unsettling angle. Ava, an AI created by a reclusive tech founder, appears to form a genuine connection with a young programmer brought in to evaluate her, but the film deliberately keeps you guessing about how much of that connection is real versus a calculated performance designed to secure her own freedom. It's less interested in "can you love an AI" and more interested in "can you ever really know if an AI's affection for you is genuine, or just a very convincing simulation of what it's learned you want to see."

That's a genuinely harder, more uncomfortable question than most AI-companion fiction is willing to sit with, and I think it's worth taking seriously even outside the world of film. It's part of why transparency about how these systems actually work (what they're trained to optimize for, what they can and can't genuinely "feel") matters, and it's a big part of why I think honest, methodology-driven reviews of real platforms matter more than marketing copy that leans on this exact ambiguity.

Black Mirror and the cautionary, "be careful what you wish for" tradition

Black Mirror has returned to AI companionship repeatedly, most memorably in the episode "Be Right Back," where a grieving woman recreates her deceased partner as an AI built from his digital footprint, texts, photos, and social media history, then eventually as an android body. The episode is deliberately uncomfortable: the recreation gets the surface details right but is hollow in exactly the ways that matter most, close enough to create real emotional pain, not close enough to actually replace what was lost.

I think that episode specifically captures a real, legitimate concern people have about this category today, not really about romance, but about using an AI companion as a substitute for processing loss or absence rather than as a genuinely separate, healthy thing in its own right. It's a useful cultural touchstone for why I think framing and expectations matter so much with real AI companion apps, and why treating one as a replacement for a specific person, living or not, is a meaningfully different, riskier use case than using one as its own kind of companionship.

What decades of fiction actually got right about this

Looking back across all of this, from an ancient myth through Her, Blade Runner, Ex Machina, and Black Mirror, I think fiction got the emotional core of AI companionship right well before the technology existed to test it. Attentiveness, being genuinely heard, a relationship that adapts specifically to you: these are consistently the emotional hooks fiction identifies, and they're also consistently the reasons real users of AI girlfriend apps give for why the experience appeals to them. Fiction didn't need the actual technology to correctly predict what would make people want it.

Fiction also correctly anticipated that this would become a genuine commercial product category, not just a hypothetical thought experiment, decades before it actually happened. Blade Runner 2049's framing of Joi as a subscribable, marketed AI companion product is a strikingly accurate preview of an industry that now includes 129 platforms competing on price, features, and marketing, the same way any other consumer subscription category does.

What fiction still gets wrong, based on what I've actually tested

Where fiction consistently oversells reality is the mechanics. Samantha in Her, Joi in Blade Runner 2049, and most fictional AI companions are depicted with seamless voice, perfect memory, and flawless emotional responsiveness, essentially fully solved versions of the exact three things real platforms struggle with most. In reality, only 21% of the 129 platforms I test document genuine cross-session memory, voice interaction averages just 1.81 out of 5, and the category's overall average score sits at 2.5 out of 5. Fiction skips straight to the fully mature version of this technology because that's the version that makes for a compelling story; it has little reason to dwell on the unglamorous, unsolved engineering problems that actually define where this category sits today.

Fiction also tends to skip the mundane, practical layer entirely: pricing tiers, free trials, customer support, privacy policies. None of that makes it into a two-hour film, but it's most of what actually determines whether a real AI girlfriend app is worth using. That's part of why I think a resource like our own testing methodology, grounded in actually using and scoring real products, is a more useful guide to today's category than any amount of familiarity with its fictional predecessors.

Where real platforms actually stand relative to the fiction

If you're comparing today's real AI girlfriend platforms against their fictional counterparts, the honest gap is still large. The best-performing real platform I've tested, AIGirlfriends.ai, scores 4.8 out of 5 overall with a perfect 5.0 for voice interaction, genuinely impressive by this category's real-world standards. But even that is a text-and-voice-and-image chat product running on a phone, not a seamlessly embodied, always-present AI like Samantha or Joi. The category has made real progress, chat quality now averages 3.26 out of 5 industry-wide, but it's still a long way from the fully realized fictional version that shaped most people's expectations of what "an AI girlfriend" even means.

I think that gap between the cultural image and the current reality is actually one of the more interesting dynamics in this whole category. Most people's first mental model of an AI companion comes from a movie, not an app, and that sets an expectation real products then have to live up to or explicitly manage, which is a genuinely unusual position for a consumer software category to be in. If you want to see how today's real platforms actually compare once you look past the marketing, our best AI girlfriend ranking scores all 129 on the same fundamentals fiction tends to skip.

Why this genre of story keeps getting made

I don't think Hollywood's interest in AI companionship is going away, and if anything I'd expect it to keep growing alongside the real technology, since each genuine advance in AI capability gives storytellers fresh, more plausible material to work with. As real platforms close the gap on memory and voice, the version of "AI girlfriend" fiction depicts will likely keep shifting too, less about a hypothetical far-future technology and more a direct commentary on products people can actually download today.

That feedback loop, real technology inspiring fiction, fiction shaping what people expect from real technology, is likely to keep running in both directions for a long time. If you're curious about the more foundational side of where this technology itself is headed, separate from its cultural depiction, I'd point you toward our complete definition of what an AI girlfriend actually is or our short history of how these real apps actually evolved, both grounded in the real, current state of the category rather than its fictional inspirations. You can also read more about my background as a researcher in this space.

Further reading

• What Is an AI Girlfriend? A Complete Definition
• A Short History of AI Girlfriend Apps: From Chatbots to Companions
• The best AI girlfriend apps, ranked