This Blog task assigned by Dr.Dilip Barad.
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 2024 film Humans in the Loop is far more than a straightforward narrative about artificial intelligence. It serves as a probing philosophical meditation on the question of whose knowledge systems are considered valid, who is rendered invisible within technological structures, and how power operates through systems that present themselves as objective and impartial. Unfolding in Jharkhand, a region with deep historical and cultural ties to India's Adivasi communities, the film centres on Nehma, an Oraon tribal woman employed in the work of annotating data for AI systems. Her experience brings to light what scholars describe as epistemic injustice — the systematic exclusion of particular forms of knowledge from the frameworks that determine credibility and expertise. The film's central tension is a collision between competing knowledge systems, and through this collision it lays bare the ideological assumptions that underpin AI technologies.
As Alonso (2026) observes in a broader examination of AI-themed narratives in contemporary cinema, stories involving artificial intelligence tend to carry unspoken assumptions — invisible beliefs about progress, rationality, and value. What distinguishes Humans in the Loop is its capacity to bring these assumptions to the surface, refracted through the daily life of a woman navigating overlapping structures of marginalization: her gender, her identity as an indigenous person, her economic precarity, and her geographic distance from centres of power.
Algorithmic Bias as Culturally Situated
The film's central conflict crystallizes as Nehma becomes increasingly aware of a gap — one that cannot be bridged through technical upgrades or larger datasets — between the fixed classificatory logic of the AI labeling platform and the fluid, relational, ecologically embedded knowledge that defines her Oraon heritage. When asked to categorize images of plants, animals, and terrain according to the system's predefined schema, she repeatedly encounters realities that exceed those categories. A plant that carries simultaneous medicinal, spiritual, and ecological significance within her community must be collapsed into a single scientific label. A forest boundary shaped by ancestral understanding, seasonal rhythms, and lived practice is converted into a static digital coordinate. Through these recurring encounters, the film reframes algorithmic bias not as a correctable technical error but as a culturally grounded philosophical position inscribed into computational systems — a position that determines, in advance, which forms of knowledge will count and which will be discarded.
Epistemic Hierarchies: Whose Knowledge Counts?
Sahay develops the film's argument around knowledge and authority with considerable subtlety. Nehma is never portrayed as a passive victim of technological domination; she is presented instead as a perceptive and reflective individual who sees clearly the shortcomings of the system she works within. In a number of significant scenes, the camera holds on her hesitation as she works through the labeling process. These pauses are not coded as confusion or emotional fragility — they register as deliberate acts of quiet resistance rooted in knowledge rather than feeling.
The depiction of the data-annotation workspace lends itself to analysis through theories of representation and ideology developed by Stuart Hall and subsequently elaborated within film studies. The space is designed to project sterility and interchangeability — glowing monitors, standardized software, workers sealed off by headphones, the mechanical rhythm of keystrokes. This visual construction, which Bordwell and Thompson (2019) would recognize as a purposeful deployment of mise-en-scène, reinforces the AI system's claim to universality and neutrality. Yet Sahay continually interrupts this environment by cutting to images of the forest, the village, and ceremonial life — spaces dense with sensory detail, layered meanings, and temporal depth. Read through Deleuze's (1983) concept of the movement-image, this editing strategy generates a sustained friction between two visual orders, each standing in for a different epistemology: the algorithmic world, reduced and standardized, against the indigenous world, complex, interrelated, and context-dependent.
The Film as Ideological Critique
The film's intellectual power rests substantially on its refusal to offer easy resolutions. Nehma does not defeat algorithmic bias by winning over her supervisors, nor does she dismantle the system through technical ingenuity. In taking this path, the narrative deliberately sidesteps the liberal humanist formula — common in mainstream AI cinema — of the gifted outsider who rescues the machine from within, a pattern that Frías (2024) identifies as a recurring feature of popular representations of artificial intelligence. Instead, Humans in the Loop concludes in irresolution: the divide between indigenous knowledge and algorithmic classification remains open, asking viewers to sit with the discomfort that unresolved contradiction produces.
This refusal of closure is itself an epistemological act. It mirrors the lived reality of communities like Nehma's, in which participation in the global AI economy offers economic survival at the cost of suppressing or erasing culturally grounded ways of knowing. A review published in The Indian Express (2026) characterizes the film as staging a confrontation between artificial intelligence and traditional belief systems. Sahay, however, goes beyond a straightforward opposition. She reveals that the imbalance between these knowledge systems is not accidental or context-specific — it is built into the foundational logic of contemporary technological power.
Conclusion
Humans in the Loop derives its force from its refusal to treat algorithmic bias as a technical malfunction amenable to engineering solutions. By grounding its narrative in the lived reality of an Adivasi woman whose indigenous ecological knowledge is repeatedly overridden by the very AI systems she helps to build, the film mounts a compelling argument that bias is not a design flaw. It is a structural outcome of the cultural and ideological frameworks that determine which forms of knowledge are granted legitimacy.
Interpreted through Apparatus Theory, the film functions as a sustained ideological critique — directed not only at AI as a technology, but at the deeper hierarchies of knowledge 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 is to expose what digital capitalism works to conceal: the invisible human labour sustaining AI systems, the cultural costs imposed on marginalized communities, and the epistemic violence encoded at the heart of the contemporary 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 digital capitalism's defining features is its systematic concealment of the labour it depends upon. Every AI recommendation engine, image recognition tool, or natural language system is kept functioning by extensive networks of human effort — data labeling, content moderation, algorithmic review. This work is performed overwhelmingly in the Global South, disproportionately by women and by individuals from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and it is routinely rendered invisible by the sleek surfaces of the technologies it sustains. Aranya Sahay's Humans in the Loop operates, among its many registers, as a pointed cinematic act of counter-erasure. Its defining political impulse is to make visible precisely what digital capitalism is structurally organized to keep hidden.
This essay examines how the film's visual approach, narrative architecture, and formal methods together bring the concealed labour of data annotation into view — and what this act of cinematic visibility discloses about how digital capitalism allocates value to marginalized forms of work and to the people who perform them.
Visual Language of Labour: The Data-Labelling Centre
The representation of the data-annotation facility in Jharkhand constitutes, from a film-studies perspective, a deliberately constructed mise-en-scène. Sahay, in close collaboration with her cinematographer, creates a visual vocabulary for the workspace that appears unremarkable at first glance yet carries considerable political weight. The setting is orderly and sparse: uniform rows of monitors, standardized seating, workers insulated by headphones, and the metronomic sounds of clicking keyboards and mice. This aesthetic of uniformity is politically significant. It mirrors the global technology industry's preferred self-presentation — streamlined, impartial, universally applicable — while quietly entrenching the ideological premises that govern digital labour.
Emotional Labour and the Affective Economy
The film attends carefully not only to the physical mechanics of data labeling but also to the emotional and cognitive demands that are inseparable from the work. Nehma's role is not passive or automatic. She must exercise continuous judgment, impose categorical distinctions, and repeatedly negotiate the tension between what she knows through lived experience and what the system requires her to affirm. In the terms developed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, this constitutes emotional labour — the ongoing management and regulation of internal states as a functional requirement of the job.
Sahay conveys this dimension primarily through close-up shots built around the central performance of Sonal Madhushankar. Nehma's face registers subtle shifts as she confronts inadequate categories, pauses between an honest and a permitted label, and gradually absorbs the cumulative weight of repeated compromise. At times her response carries a quality of quiet mourning, an awareness of the losses accumulated through these daily, apparently minor concessions. Communicated through restrained and understated acting rather than dramatic expression, these emotional states constitute a political claim in themselves. They insist that data work carries genuine emotional burden, that it resists reduction to mechanical input, and that its exclusion from dominant narratives of AI development represents not only economic injustice but a profound affront to human dignity.
Labour, Class, and Digital Capitalism
The film situates Nehma's work within a broader analysis of class under digital capitalism. The data-annotation centre occupies a revealing position within the film's spatial logic: it functions as a peripheral node of global capital, embedded within a socially and economically marginalized territory. The overseas clients who commission the labeling tasks remain entirely off-screen, present only through instructions and performance metrics delivered via digital interfaces. This absence is not incidental. The invisibility of the client, the employer, and the ultimate beneficiary of Nehma's labour reflects the actual architecture of the global data-annotation industry.
Within this architecture, workers in regions such as Jharkhand or sub-Saharan Africa are connected to major technology firms in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen through layered subcontracting networks. These structures are designed to disperse accountability and obscure relations of production, ensuring that those who perform the labour remain economically, geographically, and symbolically remote from those who extract its value. The film's narrative structure exposes how class inequality under digital capitalism is sustained not only through economic disparity but through deliberate and systematic forms of structural obscurity.
Does the Film Invite Empathy, Critique, or Transformation?
The question of whether the film fosters empathy, encourages critical reflection, or prompts a rethinking of labour relationships is best answered by acknowledging that Sahay's work operates across all three registers simultaneously, and with considerable sophistication.
Empathy is built through the film's intimate and restrained portrayal of Nehma's private world. Her relationship with her daughter Dhaanu, who struggles to find her footing in village life, her care for her infant son Guntu, and the small habits, limitations, and quiet determination that structure her everyday existence all give emotional texture to her character. These particulars transform the abstract category of "data annotator" into a fully present human being, enabling audiences to form an affective connection with a form of labour they might otherwise perceive as remote or impersonal.
At the same time, the film consistently generates critical awareness by exposing the political economy underlying data annotation. The absence of visible clients, the imposition of standardized categories, and the recurring conflict between Nehma's situated understanding and the system's requirements collectively illuminate structural inequalities. This critical dimension is never presented as direct argument or didactic instruction; it is threaded through the film's formal structure — its editing cadences, spatial organization, and performance register — placing it within the most robust traditions of politically engaged filmmaking.
The film also gestures toward transformation, not by advocating concrete reforms, but by withholding resolution. Its refusal to close the tensions it raises leaves audiences in a state of productive unease, confronting a problem that mainstream AI narratives routinely smooth over in their celebrations of technological progress. As D'Souza (2025) observes in a review for The Quint, the film's dedication to the women of Jharkhand is not merely an emotional gesture. It is a political declaration — insisting that these women, their labour, and their knowledge are real, significant, and long overdue for recognition.
Conclusion
Humans in the Loop makes a substantial and enduring contribution to the cinema of labour. By foregrounding the invisible work of data annotation, by approaching with care and analytical intelligence the bodies, emotional lives, 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 finest political cinema has always aimed for: it renders the familiar strange, draws the hidden into view, and makes what has been normalized newly difficult to accept. Read through Marxist Film Theory and Representation and Identity Studies in combination, the film constitutes a rigorous and affecting argument that the digital revolution is not immaterial, not pristine, and not morally neutral — and that the women working in Jharkhand's data centres are among its most consequential, least acknowledged, and most urgently visible makers.
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, formal choices are never decorative. As Bordwell and Thompson (2019) establish in their foundational account of cinematic art, every decision — where the camera is placed, which lens is chosen, how quickly a sequence is cut, how sound is layered — functions as an act of meaning-making. These choices actively shape how viewers engage with and make sense of what they see. Aranya Sahay's Humans in the Loop approaches this principle with unusual rigor. Its formal strategies do not simply frame or support the story; they constitute a sustained philosophical argument about digital culture, the relationship between humans and AI systems, and the broader cultural and political implications of contemporary technology.
This essay undertakes a close formal reading of the film, attending to its deployment of mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, narrative structure, and sound design as instruments through which it develops its central concerns. Through these devices, the film interrogates questions of knowledge production in the AI era, the tension between digital systems and organic life, and the cultural and political stakes embedded in human-machine relations.
Mise-en-Scène: The Visual Grammar of Two Worlds
Among the film's most consistently applied formal strategies is a deliberate division of its visual world into two distinct but interpenetrating realms: one defined by forest, village, and embodied experience; the other by screens, data centres, and algorithmic procedure. This division is rendered through mise-en-scène at every level.
In sequences set within the forest, Sahay adopts a warm, texturally dense visual palette shaped by greens, browns, and earthy tones. Light is predominantly natural, filtering through the tree canopy to produce an impression of layered complexity. The forest registers as a space of interconnection, constant variation, and irreducible specificity. Compositions in these scenes emphasize depth, with human figures positioned within wide environments rather than set apart from them. Details from the foreground — leaves, soil, branches — are frequently incorporated, reinforcing the sense that bodies and landscapes are enmeshed and co-constitutive.
Scenes inside the data-annotation centre employ a starkly different visual register. Harsh, even fluorescent lighting produces a flat and repetitive visual field. The cold luminescence of computer screens floods the frame, bleaching skin tones and rendering workers as interchangeable presences rather than differentiated individuals. Spatially, these scenes favor shallow depth of field: characters are framed tightly against their desks and monitors while the surrounding environment is stripped of identifying features. The algorithmic world becomes, visually, a domain of abstraction — smooth, standardized, and emphatically without texture.
Through this sustained visual bifurcation, Humans in the Loop uses mise-en-scène not merely to distinguish settings but to stage an encounter between two fundamentally different ways of inhabiting the world: one grounded in relational, sensory experience and the other organized around reduction, uniformity, and categorical control.
Cinematography: The Camera as Epistemological Instrument
Sahay's cinematographic approach further develops the film's visual and philosophical argument. In the forest sequences, the camera is frequently handheld or gently mobile, producing a quality of openness and responsiveness that echoes the character of human perception. Rather than tracing a predetermined course, the camera accompanies Nehma with attentiveness: it moves when she moves, lingers when she pauses, and aligns itself with her acts of looking and noticing. This mode of filming produces a form of cinematographic empathy that also functions as an epistemological position — suggesting that environments like the forest, and knowledge itself, are best approached through adaptive, situationally responsive engagement rather than rigid classificatory schemes.
In the data-annotation sequences, by contrast, cinematographic practice is characterized by stillness and compositional regularity. The camera frequently holds fixed positions, observing Nehma from static vantage points that emphasize the uniform geometry of the workspace. Repeated visual motifs dominate: identical desks, identical screens, synchronized bodily routines. This controlled immobility carries a critical charge. The camera's refusal to adjust or respond mirrors the algorithm's indifference, while the insistence on repetition visually underscores the system's erasure of particularity and difference. Through these contrasting modes, Humans in the Loop presents the camera itself as an instrument of knowing — one that either opens toward complexity or enforces abstraction.
Editing and Sequencing: The Dialectics of Nature and Technology
The film's editing practice emerges as its most overtly dialectical formal strategy. Sahay and her editor develop a sustained pattern of cross-cutting that moves between the two visual worlds — forest and village on one side, data-annotation centre on the other. These transitions are purposefully constructed rather than arbitrary, organized around thematic echoes and philosophical tensions.
A recurrent structural device pairs moments in which Nehma encounters some aspect of the natural or cultural world — a bird in flight, a medicinal plant, a ritual gathering — with scenes in which she is confronted by algorithmic labels incapable of accounting for those realities. Through this deliberate juxtaposition, the editing formulates a visual proposition: the viewer is first asked to register the density and particularity of lived knowledge, then made to witness its reduction within algorithmic representation. This technique recalls what Eisenstein described as intellectual montage — the generation of meaning through the collision of images rather than through continuity of narrative flow.
The film's handling of time further develops this structural argument. Forest scenes unfold at an unhurried tempo, allowing space for observation, physical presence, and environmental attentiveness. Data-labeling sequences, by contrast, are edited at a faster, more compressed pace, reflecting the accelerated rhythm of digital work — the relentless succession of images, productivity targets, and demands for speed. This formal opposition between expansive forest time and condensed algorithmic time constitutes an argument in itself, articulating two fundamentally different relationships to time and, by extension, to knowledge and lived experience.
Sound Design: Acoustic Epistemology
The film's sound design is among its most refined formal achievements and operates in precise coordination with its visual strategies. In the forest sequences, the acoustic environment is rich and multi-layered. Bird calls, rustling foliage, running water, human conversation, and ritual sounds coexist within a carefully balanced mix. Spatial depth is given attention throughout — sounds reach the listener from varying distances and directions — generating an auditory landscape that mirrors the visual density of the forest. Like the imagery, this soundscape communicates interconnection, complexity, and the specificity of inhabiting a particular place.
The acoustic environment of the data-annotation centre is, by contrast, severely reduced. Mechanical and electronic sounds prevail: the rhythmic percussion of keyboards, the click of mouse buttons, the low hum of computers, occasional digital notifications. Human speech is present but minimal, restricted to brief instrumental exchanges about work tasks. Just as with the centre's visual design, its sound world is one of radical reduction. The layered resonance of the forest is replaced by a narrow functional soundscape organized entirely around the logic of the interface.
The film also employs silence — or near silence — with particular deliberateness during moments when Nehma pauses at her workstation. In these instances, the ambient noise of the lab withdraws, leaving a hollowed auditory space. This acoustic emptiness functions as a form of commentary: it evokes the silence of a system unable to recognize what falls outside its categories, and the muteness of an algorithm confronted with forms of knowledge it has no capacity to encode. Through this disciplined use of silence, Humans in the Loop transforms sound into a critical instrument, expressing the limits of technological knowledge without requiring a single word to be spoken.
Structural Theory and Narrative Form
This formal openness is itself a philosophical and political declaration. It communicates, through structure, what the film communicates thematically: that the gap between indigenous knowledge and algorithmic category is not a problem that improved engineering or more enlightened data-labeling practice can resolve — it is a constitutive feature of the relationship between digital culture and the forms of life it seeks to represent and regulate. The film's structural irresolution is its most candid and most consequential statement.
Conclusion: The Aesthetics of Digital Critique
Humans in the Loop is a formally sophisticated work that deploys the full range of 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 governing formal strategy, the consistent visual and acoustic division between the world of the forest and the world of the data centre, is not purely an aesthetic decision but a philosophical one: that the digital world is not a neutral representation of the world it claims to organize, but a particular, culturally embedded, ideologically invested construction that systematically devalues and excludes certain forms of experience and knowledge. As Alonso (2026) argues, films about AI are invariably also films about the social imaginaries that both produce and are reproduced by technological development. Sahay's film, through the precision and intelligence of its formal choices, renders those imaginaries visible, contestable, and urgent.
An analysis of Aranya Sahay's 2024 film. Exploring epistemic injustice, invisible labour, and the structural biases encoded in our digital world.
The collision between Indigenous knowledge systems and the rigid logic of AI classification.
Set in Jharkhand, the film centers on Nehma, an Oraon tribal woman. The core conflict is not technical but philosophical. The AI demands static labels for entities that, in Oraon heritage, are fluid and ecologically embedded.
Comparing the richness of lived reality vs. the limitations of AI labels.
*The chart illustrates the gap between the multifaceted nature of an object in Indigenous culture and its binary representation in AI.*
How a complex living ecosystem is flattened into a sterile dataset.
Medicinal, Spiritual, Ecological, Seasonal Standardization, Binary Logic, Context Removal "Plant" (Generic, Static, Commodified)
Exposing the human engine behind the "magic" of artificial intelligence.
Breakdown of the actual work performed by annotators like Nehma.
Data labeling is not just clicking. It involves Emotional Regulation (suppressing frustration) and Cognitive Judgment (bridging the gap between reality and label), often leading to a sense of mourning for lost knowledge.
Digital capitalism uses distance to obscure accountability.
*The film creates a "counter-erasure," focusing the lens on the bottom tier which is usually hidden.*
How cinematography, sound, and editing convey the philosophical argument.
The film uses Mise-en-scène to create a dialectical opposition between the Forest (Indigenous Life) and the Data Centre (Algorithmic Logic).
Unfolds at an unhurried tempo. Editing allows space for observation, physical presence, and environmental attentiveness. Compressed, accelerated pace. Governed by the rhythm of the interface, productivity targets, and the relentless succession of images.
*Humans in the Loop* refuses to offer a technical solution to a cultural problem. By ending in irresolution, it forces the audience to "sit with the discomfort" of the epistemic violence inherent in digital capitalism. It is a rigorous argument that the digital revolution is not morally neutral.
Humans in the Loop
The Hidden Cost of Artificial Intelligence
1. AI, Bias & Epistemic Representation
Algorithmic Bias as Culturally Situated
The Reduction of Meaning
The Architecture of Epistemic Violence
Indigenous Reality
The Loop
Data Label
2. Labour & Politics of Visibility
The Hidden "Affective Economy"
The Hierarchy of Invisibility
3. Film Form & Digital Culture
Two Worlds, Two Aesthetics
Editing as Argument: The Dialectics of Time
Forest Time
Algorithmic Time
Conclusion: Irresolution as Resistance
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