This arc was probably my favorite bit of the whole film.
While replicants are on the verge of being human, if they aren’t already, Joi is still just software that’s good at mimicking human emotion.
Later, we more or less learn this outright as K interacts with the giant Joi hologram on the bridge, who calls him “Joe,” and he seems to realize it was all a lie. The first clue that something is probably off is when the replicant prostitute tells Joi that “there’s not all that much there” once they synthesize to sleep with K, implying she’s more an imitation of life than a truly separate form of it. Joi is advertised as “saying exactly what you want to hear.” In K’s case, that starts with Joi being a devoted, loving wife, but eventually, as K desires to be the child he’s researching, to be the chosen one, Joi does everything possible to encourage that fantasy, saying that she knew he was special and even giving him a name. The tragedy of Joi, which we learn at the end of the film, is that she’s nothing more than an advanced AI capable of perfectly responding to the every need of her “owner.” She comes across as totally genuine, like K is the one man making her break free of her programming and allowing her to learn to love, to the point where when we see her smashed by Wallace’s thug, it’s heartbreaking.īut the clues were there all along that Joi was essentially nothing but a cheap trick. Joi, played to perfection by Ana de Armas, is sort of the polar opposite of Scarlett Johansson’s AI in Her, which grew to become a new, self-aware form of ultra-consciousness. This one seems a bit more clear-cut to me.