Humans Behind the Machine: Technology, Labour, and Ethics in Humans in the Loop
This blog is written as part of a thinking activity assigned by Dilip Barad after the screening of Humans in the Loop, directed by Aranya Sahay. Guided by a structured worksheet, the task encouraged critical engagement with the film before, during, and after viewing. This reflection attempts to analyze the film through perspectives drawn from film studies, labour theory, and cultural criticism, with particular focus on artificial intelligence, invisible labour, and the politics of representation.
Humans in the Loop is a 2024 Hindi-Kurukh independent drama film written and directed by Aranya Sahay that blends storytelling with critical reflection on technology’s human foundations. The narrative follows Nehma, an Adivasi woman from Jharkhand who, after personal upheavals, returns to her ancestral village with her children and takes up work as a data labeller meticulously categorizing images and information to train artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Through Nehma’s everyday experiences, the film shifts the spotlight from abstract technological debates to the often invisible labour of rural and tribal communities that underpins modern machine intelligence.
Rather than portraying AI as a futuristic threat, Humans in the Loop situates AI within lived human realities, revealing how biases social, cultural, and ethical are encoded into algorithms through human contribution. The title itself evokes the concept of humans in the loop: essential actors whose decisions and values shape the behaviour of AI systems, even as they remain unacknowledged in broader tech narratives. Ultimately, the film challenges viewers to reconsider both the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence and the social structures that make its development possible
Introduction: Questioning the Idea of “Intelligent” Machines
In popular discourse, Artificial Intelligence is often described as smart, efficient, and independent. It is presented as a technological force that operates beyond human error, emotion, or bias. Humans in the Loop disrupts this dominant imagination by asking a fundamental question: Can machines truly be intelligent without human involvement?
Rather than portraying AI as a futuristic spectacle, the film grounds it in everyday life. Set in Jharkhand, the narrative follows Nehma, an Adivasi woman who becomes involved in data-labelling work that helps train AI systems. Through her experience, the film reveals that artificial intelligence is not autonomous; it is shaped by human labour, human judgment, and human knowledge. The film thus reframes AI not as a machine-driven future, but as a human-dependent system deeply entangled with social inequality and power.
Before the Film: Technology as a Social System
Before watching the film, it is important to recognize that technology does not exist in a vacuum. Digital systems are embedded within economic structures, cultural assumptions, and global hierarchies. AI, in particular, relies on large amounts of data that must be organized and interpreted by humans.
The film invites viewers to reconsider the celebratory narrative of digital progress. While AI is often associated with innovation and efficiency, its functioning depends on low-paid, repetitive labour performed by marginalized communities. Nehma’s world reflects this contradiction: she participates in a global technological economy while remaining socially and economically vulnerable.
This awareness helps position the film not merely as a personal story, but as a commentary on how global capitalism reorganizes labour through digital platforms.
Human Labour in an Automated World
One of the film’s most powerful interventions lies in its portrayal of digital labour. Nehma’s work as a data annotator involves identifying objects, landscapes, and categories so that machines can “learn.” This process appears simple, yet it demands sustained attention, cultural interpretation, and cognitive effort.
From a labour theory perspective, this work represents a shift from physical labour to cognitive and perceptual labour. Nehma does not produce tangible goods; she produces data that fuels profit-making technologies elsewhere. Despite her crucial role, she remains disconnected from the final product and excluded from its benefits.
The film highlights a paradox:
AI is marketed as reducing human effort
Yet it relies on continuous human input
This contradiction exposes the myth of automation. Machines may appear independent, but their intelligence is built upon invisible human work.
Watching Closely: Cinema, Space, and Power
The film’s visual language reinforces its themes. Natural landscapes are shown through open frames and organic movement, emphasizing relational ways of living. In contrast, digital workspaces are framed tightly, often dominated by screens and grids.
This contrast is not accidental. It visually represents two systems of knowledge:
One based on community, memory, and ecology
The other based on classification, efficiency, and abstraction
Sound design further deepens this divide. The rhythms of rural life voices, wind, birds are interrupted by the mechanical repetition of clicks and alerts. Through these cinematic choices, the film communicates how digital systems impose a different tempo and logic on human life.
Representation and Cultural Visibility
Mainstream representations of technology usually center urban, elite, and Western subjects. Humans in the Loop challenges this by placing an Adivasi woman at the heart of AI production. Nehma is not portrayed as technologically ignorant, nor is she romanticized as “traditional.” Instead, she exists at the intersection of culture and computation.
This representation is politically significant. It disrupts stereotypes that position indigenous communities outside modernity. The film asserts that marginalized groups are not excluded from digital systems they are essential to them, even if they remain unacknowledged.
However, the film also shows the cost of this inclusion. Nehma’s cultural knowledge does not fully translate into algorithmic categories. Sacred landscapes, relational meanings, and lived memory resist being reduced to data points. This tension reveals how technological systems privilege certain ways of knowing while erasing others.
After the Film: Ethics, Bias, and the Future of AI
After viewing the film, it becomes clear that algorithmic bias is not merely a technical flaw. It is a cultural issue. Machines learn from data shaped by human decisions, and those decisions are influenced by dominant worldviews.
When indigenous knowledge is forced into rigid classifications, something is lost. The film suggests that AI systems risk reproducing historical patterns of exclusion what scholars describe as digital or algorithmic colonialism.
Yet the film does not reject technology entirely. Instead, it calls for ethical reflection. It asks viewers to consider:
Who defines intelligence?
Whose knowledge becomes data?
Who remains invisible in the process?
Conclusion: Making the Invisible Visible
Humans in the Loop ultimately argues that there is nothing artificial about artificial intelligence. Behind every intelligent system lies human labour, cultural interpretation, and social power. The phrase “human in the loop” reminds us that machines do not replace humans they depend on them.
By centering a marginalized voice, the film exposes the unequal foundations of digital modernity. It urges viewers to rethink progress, not as technological advancement alone, but as a question of justice, recognition, and inclusion.
The future of AI will not be shaped only by code and computation. It will be shaped by whose lives are valued, whose knowledge is encoded, and whose labour is finally made visible.
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