Artificial intelligence is creating companions who can be our confidants, friends, therapists and even lovers. But are they an answer to loneliness or merely another way for big tech to make money?

Could you fall in love with an artificial intelligence? When Spike Jonze’s film, Her, came out 10 years ago, the question still seemed hypothetical. The gradual romance between Joaquin Phoenix’s character Theodore and Scarlett Johansson’s Samantha, an operating system that embraces his vulnerabilities, felt firmly rooted in science fiction. But just one year after the film’s release, in 2014, Amazon’s Alexa was introduced to the world. Talking to a computer in your home became normalised.

Personified AI has since infiltrated more areas of our lives. From AI customer service assistants to therapy chatbots offered by companies such as character.ai and wysa, plus new iterations of ChatGPT, the sci-fi storyline of Her has come a lot closer. In May, an updated version of ChatGPT with voice assistant software launched, its voice’s similarity to Scarlett Johansson’s prompting the actor to release a statement claiming that she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that the AI system had a voice “eerily similar” to her own.

As growing numbers of people turn to grieftech, some are disturbed by its possible consequences

When Christi Angel first talked to a chatbot impersonating her deceased partner, Cameroun, she found the encounter surreal and “very weird”.

“Yes, I knew it was an AI system but, once I started chatting, my feeling was I was talking to Cameroun. That’s how real it felt to me,” she says.

What can a pipe-smoking caterpillar, a few algorithms and a researcher from the year 2042 tell us about the future of learning? The actor turned director explains all the ideas that fed into her thought-provoking new documentary

‘This is a film about learning, full of questions, with not many answers,” announces Tilda Swinton at the start of her new documentary, The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze. “It has been dreamt up by the Derek Jarman Lab between 2016 and 2042, in conversations with thinkers both living and not, a caterpillar and one or two algorithms.”

It’s a useful heads-up that the film, co-directed by Swinton with Bartek Dziadosz, is no conventional piece of storytelling or analysis. The words “dreamt up” are telling too, for The Hexagonal Hive – which premieres at Sheffield DocFest this week – has the floating, freewheeling atmosphere of a dream. It collects ideas about neuroscience, education and the world of work, and creates a sensory collage that includes footage from Scotland, Bangladesh and west Africa, with gnomic captions such as: “What a machine the world is – how to work its gears?” It also features the voices of academics and children, as well as clips from Night of the Hunter and My Neighbour Totoro.