Humans In The Loop Review: Adivasi Women’s Work in AI Training and the Silent Rebellion of Mothers

Humans In The Loop is a 2024 independent film that marks the directorial debut of Aranya Sahay. It’s unlike any film about AI. This film sings the songs of the unsung heroes, or rather the unsung heroines, of artificial intelligence data centers in India. In just 72 minutes, a little over an hour, the film addresses the triumphs and dangers associated with it Train AI and motherhood, while observing the gap between task-oriented AI and environmentally sensitive regional communities.

The film is adapted from Karishma Mehrotra’s 2022 essay titled “Human touch“, published on Fifty Two, which is about Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) – a term used directly and immediately in the IT industry to refer to the human workforce actively involved when operating, monitoring or decision-making of an automated system. These tasks include, among others, so-called data annotation or data labeling, a task that has traditionally been outsourced to third world countries such as India.

Humans In The Loop: a film that rewrites the invisible

This special article traces the lives of the many women from underserved backgrounds who take on the arduous but crucial task of data annotation for American and European AI companies. These women are directly involved in making technology “smart” while navigating their own lives of prejudice. “Humans in the Loop” is situated in this larger context.

This film sings the songs of the unsung heroes, or rather the unsung heroines, of artificial intelligence data centers in India. In just 72 minutes, a little over an hour, the film addresses the triumphs and dangers associated with it Train AI and motherhood, while observing the gap between task-oriented AI and environmentally sensitive regional communities.

Away from the hustle and bustle of the cities, Humans In The Loop is set in the village near Johna Falls in Jharkhand, beautifully captured by cinematographers Monica Tiwari and Harshit Sahni. The lush green landscape provides a much-needed respite from the long hours keeping women busy in front of their computers, typing eagerly, testing CAPTCHA after CAPTCHA, and teaching AI models how to identify different parts of the human body.

The core of the story revolves around fictional characters, a mother-daughter duo – Nehma and Dhaanu. Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar) is an Adivasi woman who belongs to the Oraon tribe and has two children from one Small marriage system– a form of civil marriage that is not recognized by law. Her elder daughter Dhaanu (Ridhima Singh) is 12 years old and wants to live in Ranchi with her father (who belongs to the general caste and is about to marry someone in a traditional ceremony), while her younger daughter, a toddler named Guntu, is just a year old. As the film begins, we see Nehma fighting for sole custody of her children, for which she joins an AI data center near her village to prove her autonomy in caring for her children.

The porcupine and the politics of labeling

Divided into three chapters, we get an insight into how motherhood and data labeling for AI go hand in hand. The film beautifully encapsulates the AI ​​model learning to stand, then crawl, and finally run as more data is fed into the system.

IMDb

The task of flagging pests for AI becomes a critical point of contention between Nehma and her supervisor. When the supervisor asks why a caterpillar wasn’t classified as a pest, Nehma replies: “It’s not a pest, lady. It doesn’t harm the plants. That’s what I wanted to tell you during the presentation. It’s not a pest. It doesn’t eat the leaves. Just the rotten parts. So that the rest of the plant survives. It doesn’t harm the plants. AI is like a child. If you give it wrong information, it learns wrong things.”

With the support of her superiors (Gita Guha), Nehma does an excellent job as the mother of the AI; However, things at home are suffering.

Back home, Dhaanu attends a new school and has difficulty making friends. Since she cannot understand why her mother is keeping her prisoner in this village, she tries to escape on foot with Guntu to Ranchi to be with her father. When she gets lost in the forest with her little brother, she encounters a porcupine – an animal that visited her mother when she was younger.

AI is like a child. If you give it wrong information, it will learn wrong things.

The images of the noble animal are scattered throughout the film and serve to show us that Nehma and Dhaanu are cut from the same cloth and have the same quiet resilience in the face of society and its made-up rules. The animal is greatly misunderstood and even viewed as “dangerous.” In fact, the porcupine is an extremely shy creature; It has a docile nature and does not attack unprompted. The porcupine ultimately acts as a “guardian angel” for the siblings and proves that the bond with nature cannot be taught; it is more likely to be nurtured and learned. Maybe it all depends on how we label things?

The turning point comes when Nehma’s boss shows her the larger implications of the technology we’re so familiar with: generative AI. When they search for images of beautiful tribal women from Jharkhand, they are either shown images of white women in Indian costumes or are left blank, deepening the divide between the West and us. Nehma feeds the system photos taken by Dhaanu on the phone and is able to log authentic data, teaching the AI ​​to recognize people from her tribe and put her community on the world map.

What is striking is that Sahay is able to balance all these complicated issues solely on the shoulders of the mother and daughter, with hardly any men present on screen. Both actors are charming and hold the viewer’s attention until the end. While the rest of the village keeps their distance, the camera fearlessly zooms in on their faces, breaking through the invisible barriers of social acceptance. The rift that begins between mother and daughter at the beginning of the film ends with a warm mutual acceptance.

By showing acceptance, their labels for each other change, helping them understand what may seem like a threat may not be properly labeled. Nehma is not an Adivasi woman stuck in a dhuku marriage; She is a mother trying to make ends meet for her children. She is an AI data connoisseur, a woman with agency and financial freedom to care for her children. And Dhaanu is not a runaway boy; She is a good student, a good sister, a good photographer and someone who defies the changes imposed on her. In a way, both detach themselves from the world that likes to neatly name roles.

“Humans in the Loop” won the Best Indian Film award at the Bengaluru International Film Festival (BIFFes) 2025 and recently won the FIPRESCI India Award, an honor it received along with Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light.” The film has also officially entered the race for the 2026 Oscars. After its festival circuit through 2024 and limited theatrical showings, Humans in the Loop is finally on Netflix.

Aarthi (she/her) is a young feminist currently living in Jodhpur who enjoys writing about pop culture and art-related topics. In her writings she tries to position herself between self-reflection and social conversation, which leads to the exploration of unconventional ideas. In her free time she travels, writes poetry, and watches films and anime