Humans In The Loop focuses on the contradiction experienced by an Adivasi woman living in a remote village in Jharkhand while working at an AI data labeling center. A world that is increasingly becoming dependent on artificial intelligence remains mostly oblivious to the silent labor that goes into building the technology. When one thinks of AI, they don’t immediately imagine a group of marginalized women working on computers marking objects on the screen to train AI to recognize objects and movements. Aranya Sahay’s moving portrayal recognizes these individuals and strives to understand the delicate balance and the persistent conflict experienced by those positioned somewhere right between nature and technology.
Spoiler Alert
What Is The Film About?
Nehma was desperate for a job—as an Adivasi woman and a ‘Dhukni’ (someone who is not legally married and is in a live-in relationship, or a Dhuku marriage, that is not recognized by society), she had barely any rights. Tribal couples often enter such an arrangement when they don’t have the resources required to organize a grand feast for the entire village (a prerequisite for tribal society to recognize a marriage). Children born out of Dhuku relationships are ostracized. Nehma and Ritesh had decided to end their live-in arrangement, but in such cases, where the mother doesn’t have a source of income, the custody of the child is offered to the father. Although her test didn’t go well, Nehma’s friend managed to convince the supervisor at the data labeling center to hire her. When Nehma proved to her lawyer that she had a job, she was awarded custody of her daughter. Dhaanu had been living with her father in Ranchi. After being exposed to city life, she couldn’t imagine moving to a remote village with barely any network connectivity. But she didn’t have a choice. Dhaanu regularly complained about her life to her father, who was sympathetic to her situation. She had lived with him for almost a year since her mother left. Nehma was discriminated against on the basis of caste by his family, who belonged to a ‘forward caste,’ and evidently it affected their relationship. Nehma tried to introduce Dhaanu to the forest she grew up in; she shared the secrets of nature that had been passed down for generations in her community. But it was evident that Dhaanu appreciated neither the lessons nor the early morning walks through the forest. She had grown to despise her mother, and Nehma feared that the distance between them wouldn’t fade.
How did Nehma try to connect her reality with AI?
Nehma’s supervisor had repeatedly compared AI with a child to emphasize how important it was to train it right, and that had struck a chord with Nehma. The glee on her face when she watched a human digital prototype walk after she trained it to recognize human movements was similar to the joy she experienced when she watched her toddler, Guntu, take his first steps. AI had become her work child, and she was determined to train/raise it right. When one of the international clients had instructed the data labelers to mark a certain kind of worm as a pest, Nehma refused to follow the protocol. She feared that the AI-powered pesticide machine would kill the species even though they weren’t harmful to the crops. She tried explaining her stance, but she was heavily criticized by her supervisor. She was strictly asked not to ‘think,’ but to simply do what was required of her. The international companies cared about cheap labor and not the insight of an Adivasi woman who’d grown up studying nature closely. It also makes one wonder if Nehma ever discovered the tremendous devastating impact that AI has on nature and if that would have impacted the way she had come to connect with AI. She needed a job to be financially independent and provide for her children, and perhaps the truth wouldn’t have affected her decision because she didn’t have an option. Her struggle was one of survival, and she didn’t have the privilege to nitpick.
The supervisor felt remorseful about scolding Nehma for doing something rooted in right intentions. She sat down with Nehma and explained how the data that they entered were taken from foreign countries, and that erased the nuances that they were familiar with. She introduced Nehma to an AI Art Generator and attempted to show her how AI could produce the image of a ‘beautiful tribal woman in Jharkhand,’ but the pictures that AI generated were mostly of white women with blue eyes in Native American attire. Nehma was disheartened to see that AI didn’t even recognize her; she was invisible, or rather absent from the data, and she immediately felt as if her identity had been erased. She considered the supervisor’s advice and fed the AI with photos and videos of her world—her people and surroundings. After she’d entered a whole new world of data, the AI Art Generator successfully produced an image of a brown Adivasi woman, though it was yet to be perfected. Nehma experienced an unspeakable joy; she’d taught her digital child that beauty was not homogenous, and it could be found even in a village nestled somewhere in Jharkhand. Quite similar to her experience with Dhaanu, who initially didn’t care about finding beauty in nature but slowly came to cherish the forest and all that it had to offer.
Why changed Nehma’s mind?
Dhaanu found a friend in the local school she was enrolled at. Though she was ostracized by her peers at first, gradually one of her classmates, Malti, offered to be her friend. She introduced Dhaanu to her world—the forest, an ancient tree with a broad trunk she embraced with immense love and admiration (almost as if she could feel a connection with her ancestors) while proudly stating that it was planted by her predecessors, and her settlement. They stared in awe at a flock of birds forming a pattern in the sky. Their exploration was cut short after Malti’s mother asked her daughter to not mingle with a Dhukni’s daughter. She feared that they would face repercussions if someone else saw Malti with Dhaanu, and moreover, she was afraid that her daughter would also ‘become’ a Dhukni if she spent time with Dhaanu.
Dhaanu was heartbroken, and she decided to walk back to Ranchi after she returned home and saw her mother with Roshan, her childhood friend who was also a teacher at Dhaanu’s school. Perhaps she felt betrayed when she saw her mother with another man, and she felt that she didn’t belong to the world Nehma wanted her to become a part of. She sneaked out of the house after her mother left for work, and she also carried Guntu with her. She relied on a navigation app, but of course, neither the internet nor the directions were reliable. No one knew the forest like the tribal communities living there, and knowledge passed from generation to generation couldn’t just be replaced by an application. Dhaanu was lost, and as it started to get dark, she panicked. She left her brother to search for a path to the main road, but soon she noticed an animal walking away from Guntu. She hurried to her brother and noticed porcupine quills lying beside the toddler. She followed the quills and found a trail that led to the road. The forest saved her in the most unexpected way.
When Nehma returned from work, she was petrified to discover that both her children were missing. She called Roshan for help, and they began searching for the kids around the forest. Nehma was in a car with Roshan when she noticed Dhaanu walking on the main road with Guntu. She confronted her daughter, and Dhaanu expressed her frustration, though Nehma failed to understand her. Later, when she went through the pictures and videos taken by Dhaanu on her phone during her time at the village, she realized that her daughter had started to appreciate the new world she’d been introduced to, and that itself was a win for Nehma. She figured that if her daughter had made the effort to get to know her world, then she too deserved to be allowed to make a choice regarding where she wanted to stay.
What is the significance of the porcupine?
In Humans In The Loop, the porcupine plays a crucial role. They are considered shy animals that mostly stay in caves, but one of them had found a friend in Nehma when she was young. The villagers didn’t know how Nehma befriended a porcupine, but the tale of their friendship was discussed by everyone in the village. Towards the very beginning of the film, during the CAPTCHA test, it took Nehma a minute to process her emotions when the image of a porcupine popped up. The digital image captured the appearance of the species, but not its behavior or its affection. Her companion was turned into a tile block that she had to select to prove she was not a robot. Nehma experienced a rush of emotions and possibly a sense of wild contradiction at that moment. We don’t know if the porcupine that once used to be Nehma’s friend guided her daughter when she was lost in the forest, or if it was just another porcupine that instinctively felt a connection with Nehma’s children and became, in a way, their guardian angel. Regardless, it goes to show that the forest remembered kindness. Malti later discussed with Dhaanu about her mother’s friendship with a porcupine and that the quills couldn’t just be a coincidence.
Humans In The Loop’s ending suggests that Dhaanu developed a connection with the forest as well. The story of her mother’s friendship with a porcupine inspired her to go back to the forest and find out if they too could be friends. Just like with Nehma, the porcupine didn’t feel threatened by Dhaanu and Guntu’s presence. Nehma was worried when she couldn’t find her children again, but when she saw them in the forest, she was deeply moved.
Why did Dhaanu decide to stay?
Nehma apologized to Dhaanu for failing to understand her. She handed her back the phone that her father had gifted her, and she didn’t stop her from speaking to him. Her father was concerned after he discovered that she’d attempted to run away, and he added that he was coming to take her back to Ranchi. But to Nehma’s surprise, her daughter responded that she wasn’t yet ready to go back to the city. Dhaanu held Nehma’s hand tightly. She forgave her mother. She had come to realize the reason why Nehma repeatedly tried to show her around the forest and sing the songs of her people. She wanted her children to be proud of their identity instead of shying away from accepting who they were and where they came from. Dhaanu becomes a glimmer of hope as youngsters like her can bridge the gap between the two worlds. The film arrives at the idea that an ideal balance between nature and technology is what the world must strive for, though given where we stand today, maintaining such optimism is no easy feat.
