Film Screening - Humans in the Loop

This blog is part of Sunday reading assigned by Dilip Barad to analyse Humans in the Loop deeply, Also to explore AI, Bias, and Epistemic Representation, Labour and the Politics of Cinematic Visibility and Film Form, Structure, and Digital Culture. 

( Worksheet for Task )

Introduction: Cinema, AI, and the Question of Knowledge

Humans in the Loop is not a conventional film about artificial intelligence. Rather than focusing on machines, innovation, or futuristic spectacle, the film turns its gaze toward the human infrastructures that sustain AI systems. Set in Jharkhand and centered on Nehma, an Adivasi woman engaged in data-labelling work, the film interrogates how technology interacts with human knowledge, labour, and cultural power. Through its narrative focus, visual form, and ideological positioning, the film exposes AI as a culturally situated system that reproduces epistemic hierarchies and renders certain forms of labour invisible. Reading the film through Apparatus Theory, Marxist film theory, and formalist analysis, this essay examines how Humans in the Loop critiques algorithmic bias, digital labour, and the aesthetics of digital culture.

TASK 1: AI, Bias, and Epistemic Representation

Algorithmic Bias as Culturally Situated

The film dismantles the assumption that algorithmic systems are neutral or purely technical. Nehma’s work as a data annotator reveals that AI does not simply “learn from data” but learns from decisions already shaped by dominant cultural frameworks. When she is required to label images of forests, plants, or landscapes according to rigid taxonomies, the film foregrounds a clash between indigenous ecological knowledge and algorithmic categorization.

What Nehma understands relationally—through ritual use, seasonal rhythms, and collective memory—must be reduced to a single fixed label. This reduction demonstrates that algorithmic bias is not a malfunction but a design choice, privileging standardized, Western epistemologies over local, embodied knowledge systems. The film thus presents bias as ideological rather than accidental.

Epistemic Hierarchies: Whose Knowledge Counts?

The narrative makes visible a clear epistemic hierarchy: indigenous knowledge is mined as raw material but denied epistemic authority. Nehma contributes her understanding to the system, yet the system refuses to recognize that understanding as knowledge in its own right. This reflects what scholars describe as epistemic injustice, where certain knowers are systematically discredited.

Importantly, Nehma is not portrayed as ignorant or technologically backward. Instead, the film constructs her as a thinking subject who is acutely aware of the mismatch between what she knows and what she is asked to input. Her pauses, hesitations, and silences become moments of intellectual resistance. Through this, the film critiques the ideology of technological universality that claims one knowledge system can represent all others.

Apparatus Theory and Ideological Power

Viewed through Apparatus Theory, the film reveals how technology—like cinema itself—structures meaning and power. The AI interface functions as an ideological apparatus: it appears neutral, objective, and universal, while silently enforcing a hierarchy of knowledge. By embedding this critique within the cinematic apparatus, the film mirrors how both cinema and AI shape perception while masking their ideological operations.

TASK 2: Labour and the Politics of Cinematic Visibility

Visualizing Invisible Labour

A central achievement of Humans in the Loop lies in its representation of invisible digital labour. The data-labelling centre is depicted through repetitive compositions: rows of computers, identical gestures, standardized workstations. This visual monotony emphasizes how human labour is fragmented and abstracted under digital capitalism.

The global clients who benefit from this labour remain unseen, existing only as algorithmic demands delivered through interfaces. This absence mirrors real-world digital economies, where labour in the Global South supports technological infrastructures in the Global North without recognition or visibility.

Emotional Labour and Affective Cost

The film also foregrounds the emotional and cognitive labour involved in data annotation. Nehma’s work requires constant judgment, negotiation, and self-suppression—choosing labels she knows are inadequate. Through restrained close-ups, the film captures her growing discomfort, fatigue, and quiet grief. This aligns with Arlie Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour, where workers must manage internal feelings to meet institutional expectations.

The film insists that this labour is not mechanical. It has an emotional cost that is systematically ignored by dominant narratives of AI efficiency and progress.

Empathy, Critique, and Transformation

The film operates simultaneously on three levels:

• Empathy, by humanizing Nehma through her family life and maternal relationships.
• Critique, by exposing the structural invisibility and exploitation embedded in digital capitalism.
• Transformation, not by offering solutions, but by unsettling the viewer’s assumptions about technology and labour.

Rather than celebrating technological inclusion, the film questions what kind of inclusion is being offered—and at what cost.

TASK 3: Film Form, Structure, and Digital Culture

Mise-en-Scène: Two Visual Worlds

Formally, the film constructs a stark contrast between natural spaces and digital workspaces. Forest and village scenes are shot with warm tones, textured depth, and natural lighting, emphasizing ecological complexity and relational knowledge. In contrast, the data-labelling centre is dominated by artificial lighting, flat compositions, and screen glow, visually flattening both space and subjectivity.

This visual bifurcation communicates a philosophical argument: digital systems simplify and extract, while lived environments resist total representation.

Cinematography and Editing

The camera in natural spaces is often mobile and responsive, mirroring human perception and attentiveness. In the data centre, it becomes static and repetitive, echoing the rigidity of algorithmic logic. Editing further reinforces this contrast through cross-cutting between forest encounters and annotation tasks, creating what can be read as intellectual montage—forcing viewers to confront the gap between lived knowledge and its digital translation.

Sound and Acoustic Meaning

Sound design deepens this critique. Forest scenes are layered with birdsong, wind, and communal sounds, while the data centre is dominated by mechanical clicks and low electronic hums. Moments of near-silence during Nehma’s work underscore the epistemic emptiness of systems that cannot register what lies outside their categories.

Formal Irresolution

Crucially, the film refuses narrative closure. There is no technological fix, no reconciliation between indigenous knowledge and algorithmic systems. This formal irresolution mirrors the film’s central argument: the conflict is structural, not solvable through better coding alone.

Conclusion: Cinema as Digital Critique

Humans in the Loop demonstrates that artificial intelligence is never merely artificial—it is shaped by human values, power relations, and cultural hierarchies. By foregrounding indigenous knowledge, invisible labour, and formal contrasts between nature and technology, the film exposes AI as an ideological system rather than a neutral tool. Through its narrative restraint and formal sophistication, the film asks viewers to reconsider who teaches machines, whose knowledge is erased, and who bears the emotional and material costs of digital progress. In doing so, it positions cinema itself as a critical apparatus capable of making visible what digital capitalism works hardest to conceal.