Nehma, Sonal Madhushankar, returns to her Oraon community in a Jharkhand village from Ranchi, bringing along her daughter Dhaanu and her infant son Guntu after the breakdown of her “dhuku” marriage. To help support her family, she takes a job at a local data-labelling centre, where workers annotate images and videos to train international AI systems. As she settles into this routine, she begins to notice a troubling gap: the rigid categories demanded by the AI model clash with the ecological wisdom and lived knowledge of her community, revealing how algorithmic labels can oversimplify complex reality.
Dhaanu, Ridhima Singh, struggles to adapt to the village life after the move, clinging to memories of the urban world she left behind and even making a desperate but ultimately futile attempt to escape the village. The mother-daughter bond becomes a quiet focal point as they navigate displacement, tradition, and the pressures of a new kind of labor that sits at the intersection of culture and technology.
Humans in the Loop is a social drama that happens to be about AI: with its focus on indigenous women’s labor and the mother-daughter relationship, it asserts that the ethics of AI cannot be separated from caste, gender, and geography. The film invites viewers to recognize that intelligence—whether human or machine—carries the imprint of its teachers, and when those teachers are invisible, uncredited, or culturally misunderstood, the knowledge they pass on will reflect that absence.
Set against the rural backdrop of Jharkhand, the story builds a detailed picture of daily life in a community where traditional practices meet the global data economy. It highlights how data-labeling work—often performed by women from marginalized communities—becomes a link between local realities and international clients, while also exposing the vulnerabilities and precarity that accompany such work. The narrative pays careful attention to how location, caste, gender, and access to education shape who does the labeling, who benefits, and what counts as legitimate “intelligence.”
Beyond Nehma and Dhaanu, the film threads in a broader cast that enriches the village tapestry: Gita Guha and Prayrak Mehta contribute to the community’s texture, while Anurag Lugun as Roshan, Vikas Gupta as Ritesh, and Aranya Sahay help anchor the story in lived experience. Through these interconnected lives, the film asks audiences to consider how AI’s promise of progress is inseparable from the human histories that shape it.
