Humans in the Loop explores how AI clashes with traditional belief systems

Indian Express

03-05-2025

When Humans in the Loop's protagonist Nehma, a tribal data labeller at a centre in Jharkhand, is pulled up by her supervisor, she stands her ground and clarifies that the 'insect', which their Western client want to be labelled as a 'pest', is the one that protects the ecosystem by consuming rotten leaves. Nehma argues: 'AI is like a child. If you teach it wrong things, it will pick up those.' As the world is increasingly getting impacted by artificial intelligence (AI), Nehma represents traditional wisdom, rooted in nature.
Humans in the Loop, written and directed by Aranya Sahay, is a Hindi and Kurukh language movie that follows Nehma (essayed by Sonal Madhushankar), whose job at a data centre in a remote area in Jharkhand involves labelling data to train AI models. Nehma takes up this job after returning to her village with her daughter Dhaanu and toddler son Guntu following her separation from her husband. As part of her 'data labelling' job, she learns to tag images to help algorithms distinguish objects.
Even as Nehma struggles to learn the ropes of her job, the movie also highlights her internal conflict. Living close to a forest, she tries to reconnect with her tribal roots and nature. However, the differences between Nehma and Dhaanu seem to grow as the latter misses the comforts and ways of an urban life.
The movie is inspired by data labelling, which is carried out in certain indigenous regions of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Rajasthan and Telangana. Major AI firms outsource such tasks to remote regions of India, where labour is cheap. As the narrative unfolds, the feature also explores 'how human prejudices' are fed into AI systems and 'the unacknowledged consequences' for communities excluded from the tech revolution. The movie will be screened during the upcoming Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles and the New York Indian Film Festival.
In 2022, Mumbai -based Sahay came across an article regarding tribal women in Jharkhand working with artificial intelligence as data annotators ('Human Touch' by Karishma Mehrotra published in Fifty Two). He got curious about it since he has been familiar with tribal issues because of his mother Lakshmi Bhatia's work as a sociologist and researcher in tribal regions of India. The Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune graduate saw this as an opportunity to develop a cinematic tale that explores 'the interplay between a traditional society and technologies of the future'.
Following a call by Storiculture, a network of film and content expertise, to develop stories about how technology and society overlap, Sahay worked on developing this story. 'The tribal data labellers go through thousands of photos and videos to make the algorithm understand the difference between something as basic as a chair and a table. This is very similar to the idea of parenting. Like how children learn to differentiate between colours and shapes. That became the central point of this film,' says Sahay, who has directed five short films earlier, including Songs for Babasaheb and Chait.
Before he wrote the screenplay, Sahay spent nearly eight months in Ranchi and villages close to a forest near Jonha falls in Jharkhand. His interactions with Biju Toppo, a national award-winning filmmaker, and his FTII senior Seral Murmu helped him understand that world better. Even though the subject sounds ideal for a documentary, he leaned towards a fictional narrative to make it more layered and engaging.
Though Sahay tried to tap into the talent pools of FTII and National School of Drama to find a suitable tribal actor, he was not successful. 'The entertainment world of Mumbai too is biased towards fair-skin actors,' he says. Then someone suggested Sonal for Nehma's role. Even though she is not a tribal but a Dalit, she seemed perfect, mainly because of her 'evocative gaze'. Sonal, who is from Gadchiroli district in Maharashtra, stayed with the crew for 10 days during the recce in Jharkhand and observed the people there for her role as Nehma.