Humans in the Loop

 

WORKSHEET RESPONSE

Film Screening Analysis

Aranya Sahay's Humans in the Loop (2024)

Post-Screening Critical Reflective Essays

Task 1 | Task 2 | Task 3

Worksheet designed by and task Assigned by : Prof. Dilip Barad | www.dilipbarad.com

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) is not merely a film about artificial intelligence. It is a penetrating philosophical inquiry into whose knowledge counts, who is rendered visible, and how power operates through the seemingly neutral language of technological systems. By situating the narrative in Jharkhand — the heartland of India's Adivasi communities and centering it on Nehma, an Oraon tribal woman who finds herself annotating data for AI systems, the film constructs a powerful critique of what scholars call epistemic injustice: the systemic exclusion of certain knowledge traditions from frameworks of legitimacy and authority. Sahay's film is, at its core, a story about a clash of epistemologies, and in that clash, it reveals the ideological underpinnings of AI itself.

As Alonso (2026) observes in a broader examination of AI futures in mainstream cinema, socio-technical narratives about artificial intelligence carry embedded social imaginaries cultural assumptions about progress, rationality, and value that are rarely made explicit. Humans in the Loop is remarkable precisely because it does make these assumptions explicit, dramatizing them through the lived experience of a woman who exists at the intersection of multiple marginalizations: gender, ethnicity, class, and geographic periphery.

Algorithmic Bias as Culturally Situated

The central dramatic tension of the film emerges from Nehma's growing awareness of a gap a gap that cannot be bridged by more data or better algorithms between the rigid categorical demands of the AI labelling system and the fluid, relational, ecologically embedded knowledge of her Oraon community. When Nehma is required to classify images of flora, fauna, or terrain according to fixed algorithmic categories, she repeatedly encounters phenomena that her indigenous knowledge understands differently. A particular plant, known to her community for its medicinal, ritualistic, and ecological significance, must be reduced to a single taxonomic label. A forest boundary, understood through generations of collective memory and seasonal rhythms, must be assigned a fixed coordinate. In these moments, the film reveals algorithmic bias not as a technical error to be debugged, but as a cultural choice a philosophical decision, encoded in code, about what kinds of knowledge matter.

Epistemic Hierarchies: Whose Knowledge Counts?

Sahay constructs the film's epistemic argument with considerable subtlety. Nehma is not presented as a passive victim of technological imperialism. She is a knowing, reasoning, critically aware agent who actively perceives and articulates the inadequacy of the AI system. In several key sequences, the film shows Nehma pausing over her labelling tasks, her face registering something that the film does not reduce to simple confusion or distress, but rather to a form of intellectual resistance: she knows that the category she is being asked to apply does not capture what she knows.

The film's representation of the data-labelling centre is worth reading through the lens of representation and ideology, as theorized by Stuart Hall and taken up in contemporary film studies. The workspace is deliberately clinical: bright screens, standardized interfaces, headphones, the click of keyboards. This aesthetic which Bordwell and Thompson (2019) would recognize as a carefully crafted mise-en-scène visually codifies the AI system's claim to universality and objectivity. But Sahay repeatedly cuts from these interior scenes to the forest, the village, the ritual spaces that are visually rich, texturally dense, temporally deep. This editing strategy, which we might read through Deleuze's (1983) concept of the movement-image, creates a dialectical tension between two visual worlds that are also two epistemological worlds: the world of the algorithm, flattened and categorized, and the world of indigenous knowledge, layered and relational.

The Film as Ideological Critique

What gives the film its critical depth is its refusal to offer an easy resolution. Nehma does not 'solve' the problem of algorithmic bias by educating her supervisors or hacking the system. The film resists the liberal humanist fantasy common in mainstream AI cinema, as Frías (2024) observes of the enlightened individual who reforms the machine from within. Instead, Humans in the Loop closes with a sense of productive irresolution: the gap between indigenous knowledge and algorithmic category remains, and the audience is left to sit with the discomfort of that gap.

This refusal of easy resolution is itself a form of epistemic critique. It mirrors the actual condition of communities like Nehma's, for whom the global AI industry's appetite for labelled data creates economic opportunity while simultaneously demanding the suppression of the very knowledge systems that make them who they are. The film's Indian Express review (2026) aptly characterizes this as a clash between AI and traditional belief systems but Sahay goes further than a simple clash narrative. She shows how the epistemic hierarchy is structural, not incidental.

Conclusion

Humans in the Loop is an important film precisely because it refuses to treat algorithmic bias as a purely technical problem amenable to a technical solution. By grounding its narrative in the lived experience of an Adivasi woman whose indigenous ecological knowledge is systematically devalued by the AI systems she helps build, the film demonstrates that bias is not a bug but a feature a feature of the cultural and ideological frameworks that determine whose knowledge counts as knowledge. Reading the film through Apparatus Theory, we can see how it functions as an ideological critique not only of AI, but of the epistemological hierarchies that AI inherits from, and reproduces for, a particular vision of modernity. As Barad (2026) argues in his review of the film, Sahay's achievement is to make visible what digital capitalism works to keep invisible: the human labour, the cultural cost, and the epistemic violence at the heart of the 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

One of the defining conditions of digital capitalism is the systematic invisibilization of the labour that makes it run. Behind every AI recommendation, every image recognition system, every natural language model, lies an enormous human infrastructure of data annotation, content moderation, and algorithmic feedback — work performed predominantly by workers in the Global South, often women, often from marginalized communities, and almost always hidden from the glossy surfaces of the technology products they help to produce. Aranya Sahay's Humans in the Loop (2024) is, among many other things, a sustained and urgent act of cinematic counter-invisibilization. Its primary political gesture is to make visible what digital capitalism needs to remain hidden.

This essay examines how the film's visual language, narrative structure, and formal choices work together to represent the invisible labour of data annotation, and what this representation suggests about the cultural valuation of marginalized work under contemporary digital capitalism.

Visual Language of Labour: The Data-Labelling Centre

The film's representation of the data-labelling centre in Jharkhand is, in film studies terms, a carefully constructed mise-en-scène. Sahay and her cinematographer choose a visual grammar for the workspace that is simultaneously mundane and charged with political meaning. The centre is clean but sparse: rows of screens, standardized chairs, employees with headphones, the rhythmic click of mouse and keyboard. This aesthetic of standardization is significant. It mirrors the aesthetic of the global tech industry's self-representation: clean, neutral, universal.

Emotional Labour and the Affective Economy

The film is attentive not only to the physical dimensions of data-labelling work but to its emotional and cognitive dimensions. Nehma's labour is not merely mechanical. It requires her to make judgements, to apply categories, to navigate the gap between what she knows and what the system demands she say she knows. This is, in the terminology of Arlie Hochschild's sociology of work, emotional labour the management of feeling as a work requirement.

Sahay represents this emotional labour through a series of close-up facial performances from her lead actor Sonal Madhushankar. We see Nehma's face register recognition when she encounters a category that does not fit, uncertainty when she must choose between an accurate and an acceptable label, and something close to grief when she realizes the cumulative effect of her daily compromises. These affective registers rendered through restrained, naturalistic performance rather than melodramatic expression are themselves a form of political argument: they insist that this work has an emotional cost, that it is not simply mechanical, and that its invisibility in the official narratives of AI development is therefore not merely an economic but a human injustice.

Labour, Class, and Digital Capitalism

The film also situates Nehma's labour within a broader critique of digital capitalism's class structures. The data-labelling centre is positioned in the film's narrative geography as an outpost of global capital in a peripheral, marginalized region. The international clients who commission the labelling work are never seen; they exist only as abstract demands that arrive through the interface. This structural invisibility the invisibility of the client, the employer, the ultimate beneficiary of Nehma's labour mirrors the actual structure of the global data annotation economy, in which workers in Jharkhand or sub-Saharan Africa are connected to technology companies in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen through long chains of subcontracting that deliberately obscure the relations of production.

Does the Film Invite Empathy, Critique, or Transformation?

The worksheet prompt asks whether the film invites empathy, critique, or transformation in how labour is perceived. The answer, I would argue, is that Sahay's film operates on all three registers simultaneously, and does so with considerable sophistication.

It invites empathy through its intimate, naturalistic portrayal of Nehma's personal life: her relationship with her daughter Dhaanu, who struggles to adjust to village life; her infant son Guntu; the quiet dignities and deprivations of her daily existence. These personal details humanize the abstract category of 'data annotator' in ways that allow audiences to identify, emotionally, with a figure they might otherwise not encounter.

It invites critique through its persistent, structurally informed representation of the political economy of data labelling: the invisible clients, the standardized categories, the gap between Nehma's knowledge and the system's demands. This critique is not polemical but is embedded in the film's formal choices editing, mise-en-scène, performance in ways that are consistent with the best traditions of political cinema.

And it invites, or at least gestures toward, transformation not by offering solutions, but by refusing resolution, by leaving audiences uncomfortable, by insisting on the existence of a problem that the mainstream narratives of AI development prefer to dissolve into celebration of technological progress. As The Quint's review (D'souza, 2025) aptly notes, the film is dedicated to the women of Jharkhand, and this dedication is not merely sentimental but political: it asserts that these women and their labour exist, matter, and deserve to be seen.

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

In the study of film, form is never merely decorative. As Bordwell and Thompson (2019) insist in their foundational account of film art, every formal choice camera angle, lens length, editing rhythm, sound design is also a semantic choice: it constructs meaning, guides perception, shapes understanding. Aranya Sahay's Humans in the Loop (2024) is a film that takes this principle with particular seriousness. Its formal vocabulary is not simply an envelope for its narrative content; it is itself an argument about digital culture, human-AI interaction, and the philosophical stakes of the technological present.

This essay undertakes a close formal analysis of the film, examining how specific cinematic devices mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sequencing, and sound work together to convey the film's central philosophical concerns: the nature of knowledge in the age of artificial intelligence, the relationship between the digital and the organic, and the cultural and political dimensions of human-machine interaction.

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

The film's most sustained formal strategy is what we might call a systematic visual bifurcation a division of the film's visual universe into two contrasting but interpenetrating worlds: the world of the forest, the village, and the body; and the world of the screen, the data centre, and the algorithm. This bifurcation is constructed through every element of mise-en-scène.

In the forest sequences, Sahay employs a warm, textured visual palette dominated by greens, browns, and earth tones. Lighting is natural, often dappled through tree canopy, creating an impression of organic complexity: the forest is a world of multiple layers, shifting relationships, and irreducible particularity. The staging within these sequences tends toward depth: figures are placed within landscapes rather than against them, and the camera frequently includes foreground elements leaves, branches, the texture of soil that create a sense of environmental embeddedness.

In the data-labelling centre, the visual grammar changes radically. Artificial lighting, fluorescent and flat, creates an environment of visual sameness. The screen's blue-white glow is the dominant light source, and it flattens the faces of the workers, reducing them to surfaces. The staging within these scenes tends toward shallower depth: figures are placed against the immediate background of their workstations, and the surrounding environment is deliberately de-particularized. The world of the algorithm is, visually, a world without texture.

Cinematography: The Camera as Epistemological Instrument

Sahay's cinematographic choices extend and deepen this visual argument. In the forest sequences, the camera is frequently handheld or operated in ways that simulate the contingency and responsiveness of a human observer. It tracks Nehma's movements through the forest not with the smooth inevitability of a programmed path but with a quality of attentiveness following her, yes, but also noticing what she notices, pausing when she pauses, seeing what she sees. This cinematographic empathy is an epistemological statement: it says that the forest, like knowledge, is best approached through responsive, adaptive engagement rather than through pre-determined categories.

In the data-labelling sequences, the camera tends toward greater stillness and regularity. It observes from fixed positions, often framing Nehma at her workstation in compositions that emphasize the repetitive structure of the space — the rows of identical workstations, the identical screens, the identical gestures of the workers. This visual regularity is itself a form of critique: the camera's stillness mirrors the algorithm's indifference, its fixed gaze the system's refusal of the particular.

Editing and Sequencing: The Dialectics of Nature and Technology

The film's editing strategy is perhaps its most explicitly dialectical formal element. Sahay and her editor construct a systematic pattern of cross-cutting between the two worlds: sequences in the forest or village are regularly followed by sequences in the data centre, and vice versa. This cross-cutting is not arbitrary; it is organized around thematic and philosophical rhymes and contrasts.

In one recurring structural pattern, a sequence in which Nehma encounters an element of the natural world a bird, a plant, a ritual practice is followed by a sequence in which she encounters an AI category that inadequately or inaccurately represents that element. The editing creates, through juxtaposition, a visual argument: look at the richness and complexity of this knowledge; now look at what the algorithm makes of it. This is a classic technique of what Eisenstein called intellectual montage the creation of meaning through the collision of images rather than through narrative continuity.

The film's sequencing is also notable for its handling of time. The rhythm of the editing in the forest sequences is expansive sequences breathe, allowing time for observation, gesture, and environmental detail. The rhythm of the data-labelling sequences is more compressed, shaped by the relentless pace of digital work: the constant stream of images to be labelled, the metrics of productivity, the pressure to annotate faster. This temporal contrast the deep time of the forest against the compressed time of the algorithm is a formal argument about two different relationships to temporality, and therefore to knowledge and experience.

Sound Design: Acoustic Epistemology

The film's sound design is among its most sophisticated formal elements, and it operates in close dialogue with its visual strategies. In the forest sequences, the soundscape is dense and layered: birdsong, wind, the sounds of water, the murmur of human activity, the rhythms of ritual music. These sounds are presented in the film's acoustic mix with careful attention to spatial depth distant sounds, ambient sounds, close sounds creating an acoustic environment that, like the visual environment of the forest, communicates complexity, relationality, and irreducible particularity.

In the data-labelling centre, the soundscape shifts dramatically. The dominant sounds are the mechanical and electronic sounds of digital work: the click of keyboards and mice, the hum of servers, the occasional electronic notification. Human voices are present but muted conversations are brief, functional, task-oriented. The acoustic world of the data centre is, like its visual world, a world of impoverishment: all the ambient richness of the forest has been reduced to the minimal acoustic grammar of the digital interface.

The film also makes careful use of silence or near-silence in key moments of Nehma's reflection at her workstation. In these moments, the ambient sounds of the data centre fade, and we are left with something close to acoustic emptiness: the silence of a system that does not know what it does not know, the silence of an algorithm that has no way of representing what it cannot categorize. This use of silence as a form of critical commentary is a subtle but powerful formal choice.

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.

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