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

Humans in the Loop (2024) by Aranya Sahay is not merely a typical film about artificial intelligence. Instead, it operates as a profound philosophical inquiry into whose knowledge is recognized as legitimate, who is rendered invisible, and how power is exercised through technologies that present themselves as neutral and objective. Located in Jharkhand—a region strongly linked with India’s Adivasi communities—the film centers on Nehma, an Oraon tribal woman employed in labeling data for AI systems. Through her lived experience, the narrative reveals what scholars describe as epistemic injustice: the systematic exclusion of certain forms of knowledge from structures that define authority and expertise. Ultimately, the film dramatizes a conflict between distinct knowledge traditions, using this tension to expose the ideological assumptions embedded within AI technologies.

As Alonso (2026) observes in a broader analysis of future-oriented AI narratives in contemporary cinema, stories about artificial intelligence often carry implicit social imaginaries—deeply ingrained beliefs about progress, rationality, and value. What distinguishes Humans in the Loop is its ability to foreground these hidden assumptions by situating them within the everyday life of a woman shaped by intersecting marginalities, including gender, indigeneity, class, and geographical isolation.

Algorithmic Bias as Culturally Situated

In the film, the central tension emerges when Nehma becomes aware of a fundamental gap—one that cannot be bridged by adding more data or refining algorithms—between the rigid, rule-bound logic of the AI labeling system and the fluid, interconnected, and ecologically rooted knowledge framework of her Oraon community. While carrying out her task of categorizing images of plants, animals, and landscapes according to fixed algorithmic labels, she repeatedly encounters elements of reality that refuse to fit neatly into such narrow classifications.

For example, a plant that carries medicinal, spiritual, and ecological significance within her community must be reduced to a single scientific label. Likewise, a forest boundary shaped by ancestral memory, seasonal rhythms, and lived experience is translated into an unchanging digital coordinate. Through these moments, the film shifts the understanding of algorithmic bias: it is not presented as a simple technical error awaiting correction, but as a culturally shaped choice—a philosophical orientation embedded within computational systems that decides which knowledge counts and which is silenced.

Epistemic Hierarchies: Whose Knowledge Counts?

Aranya Sahay develops the film’s meditation on knowledge and authority with subtlety and intellectual depth. Nehma is not portrayed as a passive victim of technological control; rather, she is shown as thoughtful, perceptive, and critically aware of the structural limits of the AI system in which she participates. In several key scenes, the camera dwells on her pauses while labeling data. These moments are not depicted as confusion or emotional vulnerability but as deliberate acts of reflection. Her hesitation signals an awareness that the imposed categories cannot contain the meanings embedded in her lived experience. What emerges is a form of resistance rooted in epistemic clarity rather than sentiment.

The representation of the data-annotation center can be read through frameworks of ideology and representation associated with Stuart Hall and later film theory. The workspace appears deliberately sterile and standardized: illuminated screens, uniform software interfaces, headphones isolating each worker, and the repetitive cadence of typing. This carefully constructed mise-en-scène—what David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (2019) describe as a meaningful arrangement of visual elements—visually sustains the AI system’s claim to objectivity and universality. Yet Sahay repeatedly interrupts this controlled environment with scenes from the forest, the village, and ritual life—settings rich in texture, sound, and historical resonance. Interpreted through Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the movement-image (1983), this pattern of editing generates a sustained tension between two visual and epistemic orders: the algorithmic realm, simplified and standardized, and the indigenous realm, layered, relational, and dynamically interconnected.

The Film as Ideological Critique

The intellectual power of Humans in the Loop lies in its refusal to provide tidy or reassuring resolutions. Nehma neither corrects algorithmic bias by convincing her superiors nor dismantles the system through technical expertise. By avoiding this trajectory, the film resists the familiar liberal-humanist narrative—common in many mainstream AI stories—where an extraordinary individual reforms technology from within, a pattern that Frías (2024) identifies in popular cinematic portrayals of artificial intelligence. Instead, the film concludes with the conflict unresolved: the gap between indigenous epistemologies and algorithmic categorization remains intact, leaving audiences to sit with the discomfort of that persistent divide.

This deliberate openness itself becomes a form of epistemic intervention. It mirrors the lived condition of communities like Nehma’s, for whom engagement with the global AI economy may ensure economic survival while simultaneously demanding the suppression or marginalization of culturally rooted knowledge systems. A review in The Indian Express (2026) characterizes the film as dramatizing a clash between artificial intelligence and traditional belief structures. However, Sahay moves beyond framing it as a simple binary opposition. The film suggests that the asymmetry between these knowledge systems is not incidental or temporary; rather, it is structurally ingrained in the foundational logic of contemporary technological authority.

Conclusion

Humans in the Loop derives its importance from its firm rejection of the idea that algorithmic bias is simply a technical defect that can be resolved through better coding or system upgrades. By grounding the narrative in the lived experience of an Adivasi woman whose indigenous ecological knowledge is repeatedly sidelined by the very AI infrastructure she helps sustain, the film argues persuasively that bias is not a random error. Rather, it is a predictable outcome of cultural and ideological systems that determine which kinds of knowledge are treated as valid and authoritative.

When interpreted through Apparatus Theory, the film reveals itself as a sustained ideological critique—not just of artificial intelligence as a technological tool, but of the deeper epistemological hierarchies that AI inherits from and reinforces within a particular vision of modernity. As Karen Barad (2026) notes in her review, Sahay’s most significant achievement lies in uncovering what digital capitalism tends to conceal: the invisible human labor that sustains AI systems, the cultural compromises demanded of marginalized communities, and the epistemic violence woven into the foundations of today’s AI-driven world.

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 central characteristic of digital capitalism is its capacity to obscure the labour that sustains it. Behind every AI-generated recommendation, image-recognition system, or language-processing tool lies an extensive network of human workers engaged in tasks such as data annotation, content moderation, and algorithmic refinement. Much of this work is performed in the Global South, frequently by women and individuals from socially and economically marginalized communities. Yet this labour remains largely invisible, erased behind the seamless and polished interfaces of the technologies it supports. Humans in the Loop, directed by Aranya Sahay, functions as a powerful cinematic response to this erasure. One of its central political commitments is to expose what digital capitalism is structurally designed to keep hidden.

This essay examines how the film’s visual composition, narrative structure, and formal techniques work together to foreground the concealed labour of data annotation. By rendering this invisible work visible, the film prompts a critical reflection on how contemporary digital capitalism distributes value—particularly how it marginalizes certain forms of labour and the communities that sustain them.

Visual Language of Labour: The Data-Labelling Centre

In Humans in the Loop, the data-annotation centre in Jharkhand is constructed as a deliberately controlled mise-en-scène. Collaborating closely with her cinematographer, Aranya Sahay shapes a workspace that appears routine and unremarkable at first glance, yet carries significant political meaning beneath its surface. The setting is structured, sparse, and disciplined: rows of identical computer screens, standardized chairs, workers enclosed within headphones, and the persistent rhythm of clicking keyboards and mice.

This aesthetic of uniformity is not accidental. It visually mirrors the global technology industry’s cultivated image—efficient, neutral, and universally relevant. At the same time, it subtly reinforces the ideological framework that governs digital labour. The clean, repetitive design of the space suggests order and objectivity, but it also hints at the depersonalization and standardization required of those who perform the work. Through this visual strategy, the film reveals how the architecture of the workspace itself participates in sustaining the illusion of technological neutrality while concealing the human presence at its core.

Emotional Labour and the Affective Economy

In Humans in the Loop, attention is directed not only toward the repetitive mechanics of data labeling but also toward the psychological and emotional strain embedded within the work. Nehma’s role is neither automatic nor purely technical. She must constantly make interpretive decisions, apply rigid classifications, and navigate the conflict between her lived knowledge and the categories the system compels her to confirm. In terms drawn from Arlie Hochschild’s sociology, this process constitutes emotional labour—the management and regulation of feeling as part of one’s professional responsibilities.

Aranya Sahay communicates this affective dimension largely through intimate close-up shots of the central performance by Sonal Madhushankar. Nehma’s facial expressions shift subtly as she encounters ill-fitting categories, hesitates between what she knows to be accurate and what is institutionally acceptable, and gradually internalizes the emotional cost of repeated compromise. At moments, her reaction carries a muted sense of grief, suggesting an awareness of the cumulative loss embedded in these everyday adjustments.

The restraint of the performance is crucial. Rather than relying on overt dramatization, the film foregrounds controlled, understated gestures that quietly articulate emotional exhaustion and ethical tension. These moments operate as a political assertion: they insist that data annotation is not a neutral or mechanical task but one charged with affective weight. By rendering this invisible strain visible, the film challenges dominant narratives of AI innovation that treat such labour as frictionless, revealing instead the deeply human cost concealed beneath technological progress.

Labour, Class, and Digital Capitalism

In Humans in the Loop, Nehma’s role as a data annotator is situated within a broader critique of class structures shaped by digital capitalism. The data-annotation centre occupies a significant spatial position in the film: it appears as a peripheral outpost of global capital, embedded within a region marked by economic and social marginalization. The foreign clients who assign the labeling tasks never appear directly on screen. Instead, they are present only through automated instructions, dashboards, and productivity metrics displayed on digital interfaces. This absence is deliberate. The invisibility of the employer and ultimate beneficiary mirrors the actual structure of the global data-annotation economy.

Within this system, workers in places such as Jharkhand or parts of sub-Saharan Africa are connected to major technology hubs like Silicon Valley or Shenzhen through layers of subcontracting. These extended chains fragment accountability and obscure the relations of production, ensuring that those who generate value remain physically and symbolically distant from those who accumulate profit.

Through this narrative and spatial arrangement, the film reveals that class inequality in digital capitalism is not maintained solely through wage differences or uneven development. It is also sustained through structural invisibility—through systems carefully designed to conceal who works, who profits, and how value circulates across global hierarchies.

Does the Film Invite Empathy, Critique, or Transformation?

Humans in the Loop engages empathy, critique, and transformation simultaneously, weaving these dimensions together with subtlety rather than treating them as separate responses.

Empathy emerges through the film’s intimate portrayal of Nehma’s personal life. Her relationship with her daughter Dhaanu, who struggles to adjust to village life, her care for her infant son Guntu, and the quiet routines that structure her daily existence give emotional texture to her character. These moments humanize what might otherwise remain an abstract category—the “data annotator.” By grounding digital labour in domestic space, relational care, and everyday endurance, the film allows viewers to form an affective connection with work that typically appears remote and impersonal within global technological discourse.

At the same time, the film consistently encourages critical reflection. The invisibility of overseas clients, the rigid insistence on standardized classifications, and the repeated disjunction between Nehma’s situated knowledge and the system’s demands expose the structural inequalities embedded in digital capitalism. This critique is not delivered through overt ideological declaration. Instead, it is embedded in the film’s formal strategies—its editing patterns, spatial organization, and restrained performances. In this way, Sahay aligns her work with traditions of politically engaged cinema that rely on structure and style rather than explicit didacticism.

Finally, the film gestures toward transformation, though not in the form of reformist solutions or narrative closure. By refusing to resolve the tensions it stages, the film leaves viewers unsettled. This open-endedness compels audiences to confront the unresolved contradictions between technological progress and human cost—contradictions that dominant AI narratives often conceal beneath optimism and innovation rhetoric. As D’Souza (2025) notes in The Quint, the film’s dedication to the women of Jharkhand functions not merely as emotional acknowledgment but as political affirmation. It asserts that their labour, knowledge, and lived realities are not peripheral to technological modernity but central to understanding its true foundations.

Conclusion

Humans in the Loop stands as an important contribution to the cinema of labour. By foregrounding the often-invisible practice of data annotation, by carefully attending to the physical presence, emotional experience, and knowledge systems of the workers who sustain it, and by embedding this labour within a coherent structural critique of digital capitalism, the film accomplishes what the most powerful political cinema has historically aimed to do: it defamiliarizes what appears ordinary, exposes what is concealed, and questions what is typically accepted as neutral or inevitable.

When examined through the combined frameworks of Marxist Film Theory and Representation and Identity Studies, the film emerges as both intellectually rigorous and emotionally resonant. It insists that the digital revolution is neither immaterial nor ethically neutral. Rather, it is grounded in embodied labour, shaped by unequal power relations, and sustained by marginalized communities whose contributions remain largely unrecognized. In this sense, the women working in Jharkhand’s data centres are not peripheral to technological modernity; they are among its most essential, least acknowledged, and most urgently visible agents.

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 film studies, form is never simply decorative. As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (2019) argue in their influential work on film art, every formal choice—camera angle, lens, editing rhythm, framing, or sound design—produces meaning. Form shapes perception. It directs interpretation. It structures how a viewer understands what is being shown. Humans in the Loop, directed by Aranya Sahay, demonstrates this principle with striking precision. Its formal design does not simply present a narrative about artificial intelligence; it constructs a sustained argument about digital culture, human–AI interaction, and the philosophical tensions underlying contemporary technological systems.

This essay undertakes a close formal analysis of the film, examining how its mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing structure, narrative organization, and soundscape work together to express its central concerns. Through these interconnected techniques, the film interrogates the politics of knowledge production in the era of artificial intelligence, stages a visual and rhythmic contrast between algorithmic systems and organic life, and foregrounds the cultural and ideological stakes embedded in encounters between human subjectivity and machine logic.

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

In Humans in the Loop, one of the most striking formal strategies is the careful visual division of cinematic space into two interconnected yet contrasting worlds. On one side stands the forest and village—spaces of embodied, lived experience. On the other stands the data-annotation centre—an environment structured by screens, metrics, and algorithmic order. This division is expressed consistently through the film’s mise-en-scène.

In the forest sequences, Aranya Sahay employs a warm and textured palette dominated by greens, browns, and earthy tones. Natural light filters through leaves, creating layered shadows and a sense of organic depth. The forest is presented as dynamic and interconnected, resistant to simplification. Spatial composition emphasizes depth and relational positioning: human figures are embedded within the landscape rather than detached from it. Foreground elements—branches, soil, foliage—frequently occupy the frame, visually reinforcing the inseparability of body and environment. The result is a space that feels specific, sensorial, and alive.

In contrast, the data-annotation centre is constructed through a radically different visual grammar. The lighting is artificial—often fluorescent, cool, and evenly distributed—producing a flattened, repetitive visual field. The glow of computer screens dominates the image, washing out facial contours and subtly reducing individuality. Workers appear interchangeable, absorbed into the system they operate. These scenes frequently use shallow depth of field, with characters framed tightly against desks and monitors. The background is stripped of distinctive markers, creating a smooth and abstracted environment devoid of texture.

Through this sustained visual opposition, the film uses mise-en-scène not merely to distinguish two settings, but to dramatize two epistemological orders. One world is relational, sensory, and ecologically grounded; the other is standardized, reductive, and governed by control. Form thus becomes argument: the visual structure itself stages the philosophical conflict at the heart of the film.

Cinematography: The Camera as Epistemological Instrument

In Humans in the Loop, cinematography deepens the film’s philosophical inquiry by transforming the camera into a way of thinking about knowledge itself. Aranya Sahay uses contrasting camera styles to embody two different epistemological attitudes.

In the forest sequences, the camera is frequently handheld or gently mobile. Its movement feels responsive rather than predetermined. It follows Nehma with attentiveness—adjusting as she walks, pausing when she pauses, and aligning with her gaze as she observes her surroundings. This subtle mobility creates a sense of openness and perceptual intimacy. The camera does not dominate the environment; it explores it. In doing so, it suggests that knowledge—like the forest—is something encountered through sensitivity, flexibility, and situated awareness. The cinematography thus enacts a form of epistemological empathy, implying that understanding emerges from relational engagement rather than rigid control.

In sharp contrast, the data-annotation centre is filmed with compositional discipline and visual restraint. The camera often remains static, observing from fixed positions that emphasize the grid-like structure of the workspace. Repetition governs the frame: identical desks, glowing screens, synchronized movements of workers. This stillness is not neutral. It mirrors the algorithm’s inflexibility and its preference for order over variation. The unchanging vantage points create a sense of enclosure and constraint, reinforcing the abstraction imposed by digital classification.

Through these opposing cinematographic strategies, the film positions the camera as an epistemological instrument. In one mode, it accommodates complexity and difference; in the other, it reflects the flattening logic of algorithmic systems. Cinematography, therefore, becomes more than visual technique—it becomes an argument about how the world can be seen, understood, and ultimately valued.

Editing and Sequencing: The Dialectics of Nature and Technology

In Humans in the Loop, editing functions as the film’s most explicitly dialectical formal device. Aranya Sahay and her editor construct a recurring pattern of cross-cutting between two visual domains: the forest and village, and the data-annotation centre. These transitions are not arbitrary. They are thematically structured, creating deliberate philosophical contrasts between embodied knowledge and algorithmic abstraction.

A recurring structural pattern links moments in which Nehma engages with elements of the natural or cultural environment—a bird in flight, a medicinal plant, a ritual practice—with subsequent scenes in which she is required to assign rigid digital labels that fail to capture their layered meanings. The editing thus establishes a visual argument. First, the viewer encounters the richness and specificity of lived experience. Immediately afterward, that complexity is reduced within the logic of algorithmic categorization. This strategy recalls what Sergei Eisenstein described as intellectual montage, where meaning arises not from seamless continuity but from the collision and tension between images.

The film’s sequencing further develops this dialectic through its contrasting treatment of time. Forest sequences unfold slowly, allowing for observation, movement, and environmental immersion. The pacing invites attentiveness. By contrast, scenes in the data-labelling centre are more compressed, reflecting the accelerated rhythm of digital labour—the rapid flow of images, performance metrics, and the pressure of efficiency.

This opposition between the expansive temporality of the forest and the condensed temporality of the algorithm becomes a formal thesis. It stages two fundamentally different relationships to time: one cyclical, experiential, and relational; the other linear, accelerated, and productivity-driven. Through editing alone, the film articulates a philosophical conflict between ways of knowing and ways of living in the contemporary digital order.

Sound Design: Acoustic Epistemology

In Humans in the Loop, sound design operates as a subtle yet powerful extension of the film’s philosophical argument. Working in close harmony with the visual structure, Aranya Sahay crafts two sharply contrasting acoustic environments that correspond to the film’s opposing epistemological worlds.

In the forest sequences, the soundscape is layered and immersive. Birdsong, rustling foliage, flowing water, distant voices, and ritual rhythms coexist within a carefully balanced mix. Spatial depth is emphasized: sounds emerge from different directions and distances, creating an auditory field that mirrors the forest’s visual complexity. This acoustic richness conveys interdependence and multiplicity. Just as the imagery resists simplification, the sound design reinforces the idea that lived knowledge is relational, embodied, and sensorially dense.

The data-annotation centre, by contrast, is characterized by sonic minimalism. Mechanical and electronic sounds dominate the space: repetitive keystrokes, clicking mice, the steady hum of machines, and occasional digital notifications. Human speech is present but functional and restrained, limited to brief exchanges tied directly to productivity. The layered resonance of the forest is replaced by a narrowed, utilitarian acoustic field governed by interface logic. As with the visual flattening of the workspace, the soundscape enacts reduction.

Most striking is the film’s deliberate use of near silence during moments when Nehma hesitates at her workstation. In these pauses, ambient lab noise fades, leaving an almost hollow auditory space. This absence becomes expressive. It evokes both the silence of an algorithm incapable of registering knowledge beyond its categories and the muting of lived understanding within a system that cannot encode it. Through this restrained and precise use of sound—and silence—the film turns acoustics into critique. Without explicit commentary, it exposes the epistemological limits of technological systems, allowing sound itself to articulate what dialogue does not.

Structural Theory and Narrative Form

The film’s structural openness operates as a philosophical and political declaration in its own right. Its refusal to offer narrative closure formally echoes its thematic argument: the divide between indigenous knowledge systems and algorithmic classification cannot be repaired through technical refinement, improved coding, or more “sensitive” data protocols. That divide is not incidental. It is structural. It arises from the fundamental logic through which digital culture seeks to categorize, standardize, and administer the forms of life it encounters.

In Humans in the Loop, this lack of resolution becomes a formal embodiment of critique. Aranya Sahay does not resolve the tension between Nehma’s lived knowledge and the system she serves. Instead, she preserves the gap, allowing it to remain visible and uncomfortable. Structurally, the film mirrors the impossibility of reconciliation within the current technological paradigm.

This narrative irresolution is not a failure of storytelling; it is the film’s most principled gesture. By resisting closure, the film resists ideological comfort. It acknowledges that the conflict it stages is not a temporary malfunction but a defining feature of the contemporary digital order. In doing so, the film’s form becomes its most honest and courageous statement: some contradictions cannot be neatly resolved because they are built into the very structures that produce them.

Conclusion: The Aesthetics of Digital Critique

Humans in the Loop stands as a formally accomplished work that mobilizes the full spectrum of cinematic technique—mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound design, and narrative structure—to articulate a sustained critique of digital culture and human–AI relations. Its defining formal gesture—the consistent visual and acoustic division between the forest and the data-annotation centre—functions not simply as stylistic contrast but as philosophical argument. Through this bifurcation, the film asserts that the digital realm is not a transparent or neutral mirror of reality. Rather, it is a culturally specific and ideologically charged construction that organizes the world according to selective criteria, often marginalizing or erasing forms of knowledge that resist standardization.

The systematic contrast between ecological, relational life and algorithmic abstraction makes visible the power structures embedded within technological systems. In this sense, the film does not merely depict digital capitalism; it formally enacts its critique. As Alonso (2026) suggests, cinematic narratives about artificial intelligence inevitably reflect the social imaginaries that both inform and are reshaped by technological innovation. Sahay’s achievement lies in rendering those imaginaries perceptible. Through disciplined and intelligent formal choices, the film transforms aesthetic design into intellectual intervention—making the assumptions underlying AI culture visible, contestable, and urgently open to question.

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