Humans in the Loop (2024)

Nehma, an Adivasi woman of the Oraon tribe, returns to her native village in Jharkhand from Ranchi, with her daughter Dhaanu and infant son Guntu after the breakdown of her ‘dhuku’ marriage (live-in relationship). To support her family, Nehma takes up work at a local data-labelling centre, where employees annotate images and videos to train artificial intelligence systems for international clients. Soon she starts noticing a troubling gap between the rigid categories demanded by the AI system and the ecological wisdom of her own community. Meanwhile, her daughter Dhaanu struggles to adjust to the family's new life in the village, missing the urban world she has left behind. She even makes a futile attempt to escape from the village. Humans in the Loop is a social film that happens to be about AI: With its focus on indigenous women's labour and the mother-daughter relationship, it insists that the ethics of AI cannot be separated from questions of caste, gender, and geography. The film asks us to recognise that intelligence – artificial or otherwise – carries the imprint of its teachers. And if those teachers are invisible, uncredited or culturally misunderstood, the intelligence learnt will only reproduce their absence.