Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
The future and past, in a loop
Independent films like Humans in the Loop (2024) can get lost in the sea of mainstream cinema. With Kiran Rao coming on board as executive producer, the film, now streaming on Netflix, has found its global audience. The film – inspired by a 2022 article by journalist Karishma Mehrotra in FiftyTwo, titled “Human Touch” – follows Nehma, an Adivasi woman from the Oraon tribe in Jharkhand, who returns to her ancestral village after a broken relationship and finds herself needing to support her children. She takes up work as a data labeller at an AI data centre, assigning labels to images/videos to train AI systems. As she works, she begins to realise that the categories she is asked to mark and the systems she helps build may carry biases far removed from her cultural knowledge of nature, community and labor.
The relationship between Nehma and her daughter Dhaanu is one of the film’s emotional cores. The daughter is drawn toward the urban world, while Nehma is drawn back to the land and traditions; but Nehma finds herself also drawn forward into this new mode of work. It’s beautifully rendered without forcing sentimentality.
The quiet tension of progress
Watching this film felt like spending time in a space of quiet tension: between place and displacement, between tradition and tech, between caregiving and coded labor. I found myself rooting for Nehma not just as a mother supporting her children, but as a subtle seismic force shifting the axis of how we think about progress.
Cinematically, the film uses contrasting spaces meaningfully: the lush village, the rhythmic sounds of nature, the sterile data‐labelling room full of screens and quiet intensity. These juxtapositions underline the film’s theme of loops: nature vs tech, labor vs identity, home vs exile. The sound design in particular is evocative – natural forest crickets and the digital hum interweave to create a soulful backdrop.
A hopeful loop
On the theme of AI enhancing tribal lives, the film isn’t anti‐AI. Rather, it suggests that when AI systems incorporate the labor, perspectives, and knowledge of tribal communities, they can serve as tools of recognition and empowerment. When Nehma insists on shaping the labels, on inserting her lived ecological knowledge into the system, the film shows that technology can become a site of agency—not just extraction. In that sense, the loop is hopeful: the human helps train the machine, the machine’s outputs can reflect the training, and the human learns not just to survive but to assert their knowledge. When done ethically and collaboratively, AI becomes part of a cycle of continuity—not a break with tradition but a tool to sustain and evolve it.
Titled after the human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach that actively integrates human input and expertise into machine learning and AI systems, Humans in the Loop is a quietly significant film. Director Aranya Sahay has crafted something that speaks to the age of AI without forgetting the human, the laborer, the mother, the land. It’s a film I believe will resonate more over time, as conversations about AI and equity become louder.