‘Humans in the Loop’: AI’s Unsung Women

The movie opens with two young girls lying in the grass. A porcupine peers back while birds fly overhead. You feel the murmur of the jungle that surrounds them. That idyllic scene is rudely interrupted: you now see a highway, with streams of cars driving through, but they’re only data to be labeled; people walking, also data to be labeled; and people waiting for a train, also…you get it. 

Humans in the Loop, which Aranya Sahay wrote, directed, and produced, is barely over one hour long, but manages to leave you with searing imagery. We’re witnessing an AI boom of unprecedented levels, which has catapulted the market caps of companies such as NVIDIA and Microsoft by trillions of dollars, and valuations of private companies such as OpenAI into the hundreds of billions.

But, like in many trillion-dollar industries, low-cost labor makes many of these companies possible. Who can forget the scandal of Amazon AI grocery shops, which actually had Indians manually checking receipts? As the joke goes, AI doesn’t stand for artificial intelligence, but “always Indian.” Humans in the Loop ensures you never forget this fact, no matter how crisp and accurate the technology becomes.