Humans in the Loop

 Humans in the Loop

TASK 1: AI, Bias & Epistemic Representation

Prompt: Critically analyze how Humans in the Loop represents the relationship between technology (AI) and human knowledge, examining algorithmic bias as culturally situated and epistemic hierarchies within technological systems.

Introduction: Technology Meets Indigenous Knowledge

Aranya Sahay’s Humans in the Loop (2024) goes far beyond being a conventional film about artificial intelligence. It functions as a sharp philosophical reflection on whose knowledge is valued, who remains unseen, and how authority is exercised through technologies that claim neutrality. Set in Jharkhand, a region deeply associated with India’s Adivasi populations, the film follows Nehma, an Oraon tribal woman engaged in the task of labeling data for AI systems. Through her story, the film exposes what is often described as epistemic injustice—the structural marginalization of certain ways of knowing from systems that define legitimacy and expertise. At its heart, the film stages a confrontation between different knowledge systems, using this tension to uncover the ideological foundations embedded within AI technologies themselves.

As Alonso (2026) notes in a wider discussion of future-oriented AI narratives in popular cinema, stories about artificial intelligence frequently carry hidden social imaginaries—unspoken beliefs about development, logic, and worth. Humans in the Loop stands out because it brings these assumptions to the surface, revealing them through the everyday realities of a woman shaped by overlapping forms of marginalization, including gender, indigeneity, economic status, and spatial isolation.

Algorithmic Bias as Culturally Situated

The film’s core conflict develops as Nehma gradually realizes the existence of a divide—one that cannot be resolved through increased datasets or more sophisticated algorithms—between the inflexible classificatory logic of the AI labeling system and the dynamic, relational, and environmentally grounded knowledge system of her Oraon community. As she is instructed to sort images of plants, animals, and landscapes into predetermined algorithmic categories, she repeatedly confronts realities that resist such rigid classification. A plant that holds medicinal, spiritual, and ecological meaning within her community must be compressed into a single scientific category. Similarly, a forest boundary shaped by ancestral memory, seasonal cycles, and lived experience is forced into a static digital coordinate. Through these encounters, the film reframes algorithmic bias not as a mere technical flaw requiring correction, but as a culturally embedded decision—a philosophical stance inscribed into computational systems that determines which forms of knowledge are recognized and which are erased.

Epistemic Hierarchies: Whose Knowledge Counts?

Sahay advances the film’s argument about knowledge and authority with notable restraint and complexity. Nehma is never depicted as a silent sufferer under technological domination; instead, she emerges as an intellectually alert and reflective individual who recognizes the limitations of the AI system she works within. Throughout several pivotal moments, the camera lingers on her hesitation during the labeling process. These pauses are not framed as uncertainty or emotional overwhelm but as moments of conscious dissent. Nehma understands that the imposed categories fail to account for the meanings she carries, revealing a quiet yet firm resistance grounded in knowledge rather than emotion.

The depiction of the data-annotation centre can be productively interpreted through theories of representation and ideology associated with Stuart Hall and later developments in film studies. The workspace is intentionally sterile and uniform—glowing monitors, identical software layouts, headphones isolating workers, and the steady rhythm of keystrokes. This visual design, which David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (2019) would identify as a deliberate use of mise-en-scène, visually reinforces the AI system’s assertion of neutrality and universal applicability. However, Sahay consistently disrupts this environment by cutting to scenes of the forest, the village, and ritual practices—spaces marked by sensory richness, layered textures, and historical depth. Read through Gilles Deleuze’s (1983) notion of the movement-image, this editing pattern produces a dynamic tension between two visual regimes that also signify two competing ways of knowing: the algorithmic world, simplified and standardized, and the indigenous world, complex, interconnected, and relational.

The Film as Ideological Critique

The film’s intellectual strength lies in its deliberate rejection of neat or comforting conclusions. Nehma does not overcome algorithmic bias by persuading her supervisors, nor does she subvert the system through technological mastery. In doing so, the narrative avoids the liberal humanist trope—frequently found in popular AI films—of the exceptional individual who redeems the machine from within, a tendency that Frías (2024) identifies in mainstream representations of artificial intelligence. Instead, *Humans in the Loop* ends in a state of unresolved tension: the divide between indigenous ways of knowing and algorithmic classification persists, compelling viewers to confront the unease produced by that unresolved contradiction.

This open-endedness functions as an epistemic intervention in its own right. It reflects the lived realities of communities like Nehma’s, where participation in the global AI economy offers financial survival even as it requires the erasure or silencing of culturally embedded knowledge practices. A review in *The Indian Express* (2026) describes the film as portraying a confrontation between artificial intelligence and traditional belief systems. Yet Sahay moves beyond a simple oppositional framework. She demonstrates that the imbalance between these knowledge systems is not accidental or situational, but structurally embedded within the very logic of contemporary technological power.

Conclusion

Humans in the Loop gains its significance from its clear refusal to frame algorithmic bias as a merely technical flaw that can be corrected through improved design or optimization. By anchoring its story in the everyday reality of an Adivasi woman whose indigenous ecological understanding is continually sidelined by the very AI systems she contributes to, the film makes a compelling case that bias is not an accidental malfunction. Instead, it is an integral outcome of the cultural and ideological structures that decide which forms of knowledge are recognized as legitimate.

When viewed through the lens of Apparatus Theory, the film emerges as a sustained ideological critique—not only of artificial intelligence as a technology, but of the deeper epistemological hierarchies that AI absorbs from and reinforces within a specific model of modernity. As Karen Barad (2026) observes in her review of the film, Sahay’s most important accomplishment lies in exposing what digital capitalism actively obscures: the invisible human labour behind AI systems, the cultural sacrifices demanded of marginalized communities, and the epistemic violence embedded at the core of the contemporary AI revolution.

TASK 2: Labour & the Politics of Cinematic Visibility

Prompt: Examine how the film visualizes invisible labour and what it suggests about labour under digital capitalism, including how its visual language represents labelling work and the emotional experience of labour.

Introduction: Making the Invisible Visible

A defining feature of digital capitalism is its ability to conceal the labour on which it fundamentally depends. Every AI-driven suggestion, image-processing tool, or language system is sustained by vast networks of human work—data labeling, content moderation, and algorithmic correction. This labour is carried out largely in the Global South, most often by women and by people from socially and economically marginalized groups, and it is systematically erased from the polished interfaces of the technologies it enables. Aranya Sahay’s 'Humans in the Loop' operates, among its many concerns, as a powerful cinematic intervention against this erasure. Its central political impulse is to reveal what digital capitalism is structurally invested in keeping out of sight.

This essay explores how the film’s visual style, narrative organization, and formal strategies collectively bring the hidden labour of data annotation into view. In doing so, it considers what such representation reveals about how contemporary digital capitalism assigns value to marginalized forms of work and the people who perform them.

Visual Language of Labour: The Data-Labelling Centre

The depiction of the data-annotation centre in Jharkhand is, from a film-studies perspective, an intentionally designed mise-en-scène. Sahay, working closely with her cinematographer, establishes a visual style for the workspace that appears ordinary on the surface yet carries strong political resonance. The environment is orderly but minimal: uniform rows of computer monitors, identical seating, workers enclosed by headphones, and the steady, repetitive sounds of clicking keyboards and mice. This carefully curated aesthetic of uniformity is crucial. It echoes the global technology sector’s preferred self-image—sleek, impartial, and universally applicable—while quietly reinforcing the ideological assumptions that underpin digital labour itself.

Emotional Labour and the Affective Economy

The film pays close attention not only to the physical routines of data-labeling but also to the emotional and cognitive demands embedded within this work. Nehma’s task is far from automatic or purely technical. She is required to exercise judgment, impose classifications, and continually negotiate the tension between what she understands through lived experience and what the system requires her to affirm. In the language of Arlie Hochschild’s sociology, this constitutes emotional labour—the regulation and management of feeling as an integral part of one’s job.

Sahay conveys this dimension of labour primarily through a sequence of close-up shots featuring the lead performance by Sonal Madhushankar. Nehma’s expressions subtly shift as she confronts mismatched categories, hesitates between truthful and permissible labels, and gradually absorbs the emotional weight of repeated compromise. At times, her response approaches a quiet sense of loss as she becomes aware of the cumulative impact of these small, daily concessions. These emotional states—communicated through controlled, understated acting rather than overt dramatization—serve as a political statement in themselves. They affirm that data work carries a profound emotional burden, that it cannot be reduced to mechanical input, and that its exclusion from dominant narratives of AI innovation represents not only an economic injustice but a deeply human one.

Labour, Class, and Digital Capitalism

The film further embeds Nehma’s work within a wider analysis of class relations under digital capitalism. The data-annotation centre occupies a telling position in the film’s spatial logic: it functions as a satellite node of global capital located within a socially and economically marginalized region. The overseas clients who commission the labeling tasks are conspicuously absent from the screen, appearing only indirectly through instructions and performance metrics delivered via digital interfaces. This absence is not incidental. The invisibility of the client, the employer, and the ultimate beneficiary of Nehma’s labour reflects the real architecture of the global data-annotation industry.

In this system, workers based in regions such as Jharkhand or sub-Saharan Africa are linked to powerful technology firms in locations like Silicon Valley or Shenzhen through extended subcontracting networks. These chains are designed to fragment responsibility and conceal relations of production, ensuring that those who perform the labour remain distant—economically, geographically, and symbolically—from those who extract its value. Through this narrative structure, the film exposes how class inequality in digital capitalism is sustained not only by economic disparity but by deliberate forms of structural obscurity.

Does the Film Invite Empathy, Critique, or Transformation?

The worksheet’s question—whether the film encourages empathy, critical reflection, or a rethinking of labour—can best be answered by recognizing that Sahay’s work engages all three dimensions at once, and with notable nuance.

Empathy is generated through the film’s close, understated depiction of Nehma’s private world. Her bond with her daughter Dhaanu, who finds it difficult to adapt to village life, her care for her infant son Guntu, and the small routines, constraints, and quiet perseverance that shape her everyday existence all lend emotional depth to her character. These details transform the abstract figure of the “data annotator” into a fully realized human presence, allowing viewers to connect affectively with a form of labour they might otherwise perceive as distant or impersonal.

At the same time, the film consistently invites critique by exposing the political economy underlying data annotation work. The absence of visible clients, the insistence on standardized classifications, and the recurring mismatch between Nehma’s situated knowledge and the system’s expectations collectively point to structural inequalities. This critical dimension is never delivered as overt argument or didactic statement; instead, it is woven into the film’s formal fabric—its editing rhythms, spatial design, and performance style—aligning it with the strongest traditions of politically engaged cinema.

Finally, the film gestures toward transformation, not by proposing reforms or solutions, but by deliberately withholding closure. Its refusal to resolve the tensions it raises leaves audiences unsettled, compelling them to confront a problem that dominant narratives of AI innovation often smooth over in celebrations of technological advancement. As a review in *The Quint* by D'Souza (2025) observes, the film’s dedication to the women of Jharkhand is not simply an emotional tribute. It is a political assertion—affirming that these women, their labour, and their knowledge are real, consequential, and deserving of recognition.

Conclusion

Humans in the Loop makes a significant contribution to the cinema of labour. By centering the invisible work of data annotation, by attending with care and intelligence to the bodies, emotions, and knowledge systems of the workers who perform it, and by situating that work within a structurally coherent critique of digital capitalism, the film achieves what the best political cinema has always sought to achieve: it makes the familiar strange, the hidden visible, and the acceptable questionable. Read through the combined lenses of Marxist Film Theory and Representation and Identity Studies, the film emerges as a rigorous and moving argument that the digital revolution is not disembodied, not clean, and not innocent and that the women of Jharkhand's data centres are among its most significant, least acknowledged, and most urgently visible authors.

TASK 3: Film Form, Structure & Digital Culture

Prompt: Analyze how film form and cinematic devices (camera techniques, editing, sequencing, sound) convey philosophical concerns about digital culture and human-AI interaction.

Introduction: Form as Argument

Within film studies, form is never a matter of surface embellishment alone. As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (2019) emphasize in their influential discussion of film art, every formal decision—whether involving camera placement, lens selection, editing tempo, or sound design—functions as a meaning-making act. Such choices actively shape how viewers perceive, interpret, and understand a film. Aranya Sahay’s *Humans in the Loop* approaches this idea with exceptional rigor. Its formal strategies do not merely frame the story; they operate as a sustained argument about digital culture, human–AI relations, and the deeper philosophical implications of contemporary technology.

This essay offers a close formal reading of the film, focusing on how its use of mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing patterns, narrative sequencing, and sound design collectively articulate its key concerns. Through these devices, the film probes questions about knowledge production in the age of artificial intelligence, the tension between digital systems and organic life, and the cultural and political stakes embedded in interactions between humans and machines.

Mise-en-Scène: The Visual Grammar of Two Worlds

One of the film’s most consistent formal strategies is a deliberate visual splitting of its cinematic space into two distinct yet overlapping realms: one defined by the forest, the village, and embodied life, and the other by screens, data centres, and algorithmic logic. This division is articulated through the film’s mise-en-scène at every level.

In the sequences set within the forest, Sahay adopts a warm, richly textured visual scheme shaped by greens, browns, and earthy hues. Illumination is largely natural, filtered through foliage, producing a sense of layered complexity. The forest appears as a space of interconnection, constant variation, and specificity that resists simplification. Spatial composition in these scenes emphasizes depth, with human figures situated within expansive environments rather than isolated from them. Foreground details—leaves, branches, soil—are frequently incorporated, reinforcing the idea that bodies and landscapes are inseparable and mutually constitutive.

By contrast, scenes set in the data-annotation centre employ a starkly different visual language. Harsh artificial lighting, often fluorescent and uniform, creates a flattened and repetitive visual field. The cool glow of computer screens dominates the frame, bleaching facial features and rendering workers as interchangeable surfaces rather than distinct individuals. Spatially, these scenes favor shallow depth: characters are framed tightly against their desks and monitors, while the surrounding space is stripped of identifying detail. Visually, the algorithmic environment becomes a realm of abstraction—smooth, standardized, and notably devoid of texture.

Through this sustained contrast, *Humans in the Loop* uses mise-en-scène not simply to differentiate settings, but to stage a confrontation between two ways of inhabiting and understanding the world: one grounded in relational, sensory experience, and the other organized around reduction, uniformity, and control.

Cinematography: The Camera as Epistemological Instrument

Sahay’s use of cinematography further develops the film’s visual and philosophical argument. In the forest scenes, the camera is often handheld or subtly mobile, producing an effect of openness and responsiveness that echoes human perception. Rather than imposing a smooth, predetermined trajectory, the camera accompanies Nehma with attentiveness: it moves when she moves, lingers when she hesitates, and aligns itself with her act of looking. This mode of filming generates a form of cinematographic empathy that operates as an epistemological claim. It suggests that environments such as the forest—and knowledge itself—are best engaged through flexible, situational awareness rather than rigid systems of classification.

By contrast, the data-annotation sequences are marked by visual restraint and compositional regularity. The camera frequently remains static, observing Nehma from fixed vantage points that accentuate the uniform architecture of the workspace. Repeated patterns dominate the frame: identical desks, screens, and synchronized bodily motions. This controlled stillness functions as a critical gesture. The camera’s unyielding gaze echoes the algorithm’s lack of responsiveness, and its emphasis on repetition visually reinforces the system’s disregard for specificity and difference. Through these contrasting cinematographic modes, *Humans in the Loop* positions the camera itself as a tool of knowing—one that either accommodates complexity or enforces abstraction.

Editing and Sequencing: The Dialectics of Nature and Technology

The film’s editing emerges as its most overtly dialectical formal strategy. Sahay and her editor develop a recurring pattern of cross-cutting that moves back and forth between the two visual worlds—the forest and village on one hand, and the data-annotation centre on the other. These transitions are carefully motivated rather than random, structured around thematic echoes and philosophical contrasts.

A repeated structural device pairs moments in which Nehma encounters aspects of the natural or cultural world—a bird, a plant, a ritual—with subsequent scenes in which she confronts algorithmic labels that fail to account for those realities. Through this deliberate juxtaposition, the editing constructs a visual proposition: the viewer is first invited to register the density and specificity of lived knowledge, and then to confront its reduction within algorithmic representation. This method recalls what Sergei Eisenstein termed *intellectual montage*, where meaning is produced through the collision of images rather than through smooth narrative flow.

The film’s sequencing also articulates a striking contrast in its treatment of time. Scenes set in the forest unfold at an unhurried pace, allowing space for observation, bodily movement, and environmental detail. In contrast, the data-labeling sequences are edited with greater compression, reflecting the accelerated tempo of digital labour—the endless succession of images, productivity targets, and the demand for speed. This opposition between the expansive temporality of the forest and the condensed time of the algorithm functions as a formal argument in itself, staging two fundamentally different relationships to time, and by extension, to knowledge and lived experience within 'Humans in the Loop'.

Sound Design: Acoustic Epistemology

The film’s sound design ranks among its most refined formal strategies and works in close coordination with its visual language. In the forest sequences, the acoustic environment is rich and multi-layered. Bird calls, rustling leaves, flowing water, human voices, and ritual rhythms coexist within a carefully balanced sound mix. Attention is given to spatial depth—sounds emerge from varying distances and directions—producing an auditory space that mirrors the forest’s visual density. Like the imagery, this soundscape communicates interconnection, complexity, and the specificity of lived experience.

By contrast, the sonic atmosphere of the data-annotation centre is markedly stripped down. Mechanical and electronic noises dominate: the repetitive tapping of keyboards, the clicking of mice, the low hum of machines, and occasional digital alerts. Human speech is present but subdued, limited to brief, instrumental exchanges related to work. As with the centre’s visual design, its acoustic environment is one of reduction. The layered resonance of the forest gives way to a narrow, functional soundscape governed by the logic of the interface.

The film also deploys silence—or near silence—with particular care during moments when Nehma pauses at her workstation. In these instances, the ambient noise of the lab recedes, leaving an almost hollow auditory space. This acoustic emptiness functions as commentary: it evokes the silence of a system incapable of recognizing what lies beyond its categories, and the muteness of an algorithm confronted with forms of knowledge it cannot encode. Through this restrained use of silence, *Humans in the Loop* transforms sound itself into a critical tool, articulating the limits of technological knowledge without a single spoken word.

Structural Theory and Narrative Form

This formal openness is itself a philosophical and political statement. It says, in structural terms, what the film says thematically: that the gap between indigenous knowledge and algorithmic category is not a problem to be solved by a better algorithm or a more enlightened data-labelling protocol, but a constitutive feature of the relationship between digital culture and the forms of life it seeks to represent and organize. The film's formal irresolution is its most honest and most courageous statement.

Conclusion: The Aesthetics of Digital Critique

Humans in the Loop is a formally sophisticated film that uses the full range of its cinematic resources  mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound, narrative structure  to construct a sustained and rigorous argument about digital culture and human-AI interaction. Its central formal strategy, the systematic visual and acoustic bifurcation between the world of the forest and the world of the data centre, is not merely an aesthetic choice but a philosophical argument: that the digital world is not a neutral representation of the world it claims to organize, but a particular, culturally situated, ideologically laden construction that systematically devalues and excludes certain forms of knowledge and experience. As Alonso (2026) argues, films about AI are always also films about the social imaginaries that shape and are shaped by technological development. Sahay's film, through the intelligence of its formal choices, makes those social imaginaries visible, questionable, and urgent.

References :

Alonso, David V. "Imagining AI Futures in Mainstream Cinema: Socio-Technical Narratives and Social Imaginaries." AI & Society, 2026,https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-02880-7. 

Anjum, Nootan. "Aranya Sahay's Humans in the Loop and the Politics of AI Data Labelling." The Federal, 2026, thefederal.com/films/aranya-sahay-humans-in-the-loop-oscar-adivasi-data-labelling-jharkhand-ai-tribal-216946.

Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, retrieved 15 Feb. 2026, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatus_(journal) .

Barad, Dilip. "Humans in the Loop: Exploring AI, Labour and Digital Culture." Blog post, Jan. 2026, blog.dilipbarad.com/2026/01/humans-in-loop-film-review-exploringai.html .

Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, University of California Press, 1967.

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 12th ed., McGraw-Hill Education, 2019.

Cave, Stephen, et al. "Shuri in the Sea of Dudes: The Cultural Construction of the AI Engineer in Popular Film, 1920–2020." Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 65–82, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192889898.003.0005 .

D'souza, Sahir Avik. "'Humans in the Loop': A Thoughtful Film About the Human Intelligence Behind AI." The Quint, 5 Sept. 2025, thequint.com/entertainment/bollywood/humans-in-the-loop-review-ai-theatrical-release .

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

"Film Theory." The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2025,https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbaf004 .

Frías, Carlos L. "The Paradox of Artificial Intelligence in Cinema." Cultura Digital, vol. 2, no. 1, 2024, pp. 5–25,https://doi.org/10.23882/cdig.240999  .

Göker, Deniz. "Human-Like Artificial Intelligence in Indian Cinema: Cultural Narratives, Ethical Dimensions, and Posthuman Perspectives." International Journal of Cultural and Social Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 2025, pp. 1–10,https://doi.org/10.46442/intjcss.1799907 .

Haris, M. J., et al. "Identifying Gender Bias in Blockbuster Movies through the Lens of Machine Learning." Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, vol. 10, 2023, p. 94, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01576-3 .

"Humans in the Loop (Film)." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, retrieved 15 Feb. 2026, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_in_the_Loop_(film) .

Indian Express Editorial. "Humans in the Loop Explores How AI Clashes with Traditional Belief Systems." The Indian Express, 3 May 2025, indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/humans-in-the-loop-explores-how-ai-clashes-with-traditional-belief-systems-9980634/ .

McDonald, Kevin. Film Theory: The Basics. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2023.

Mehrotra, Karishma. "Human Touch." Fifty Two, 2022, fiftytwo.in/story/human-touch/ .

Sahay, Aranya, director. Humans in the Loop. Storiculture, 2024.

Vighi, Fabio. Critical Theory and Film: Rethinking Ideology through Film Noir. Bloomsbury Academic India, 2019.

Thank You !