Humans in the Loop - A Review

 

While reading the Mumbai edition of The Indian Express, I came across this article, ‘What AI has to do with Motherhood ‘, by Neeraj Bunkar, about the movie Humans in the Loop. I watched the movie, which is divided into three chapters and runs 1 hour and 14 minutes. As I watched the movie this morning, one scene made me think about how AI can impact our lives. If we are not labelled, then we don’t exist in the world of AI. One practical application is in agriculture, where it helps remove pests and weeds. The character of Nehma, played by Sonal Madhushankar, points out to her supervisor that a beautiful green worm or larvae is not a pest. She shares her indigenous knowledge, saying they only eat the rotten parts of the leaf. She refuses to label it as a pest. This will enrage the American company funding the AI centre in India, where many tribal women from Jharkhand are employed as data labellers or annotators. Nehma is a child of the forest. The villagers say that she tamed a porcupine as a child and used to spend time with it in the forest. Humans in the Loop is based on an article by Karishma Mehrotra titled Human Touch. The article is about the first-generation women workers in Indian towns and villages. Produced by Kiran Rao, Humans in the Loop explores 

Artificial Intelligence is described through the often-repeated line – AI is like a Child - AI learns from its environment (data), can absorb human biases, and develops through feedback. Still, it lacks true consciousness and life experience. Just like the child who learns to walk in the movie, AI is also learning to perform tasks. What it learns matters a lot, and this is what the film is telling us. Artificial intelligence systems that are developed and deployed using a perspective centred on Western/European cultures, values, and data, often at the expense of non-Western experiences and knowledge systems. When Nehma types the prompt "Beautiful Tribal Woman," the images generated are of Native American women. She trains the AI model to create images of beautiful tribal women from Jharkhand by labelling pictures of women from her tribe. This is an act of reclamation and assertion. The superb cinematography captures two scenes that can be seen as the movie's core – one is the hands feeling the softness and dampness of the mossy rock, and the other is the final scene in which Nehma (as a child) listens to the sounds of Nature by pressing her ears against the ground. The movie is also a case study for gender sensitivity, women’s rights, and Neo-colonialism. The movie doesn’t suggest that AI is bad, but it argues that AI should also incorporate local, indigenous knowledge systems.

Reference 

https://fiftytwo.in/story/human-touch/