It was the eve of the Maharashtra Assembly elections, but the buzz in Pune’s cinema circle was about the screening of Humans in the Loop, a short film written and directed by FTII alumni Aranya Sahay.
The show at the National Archives on November 19 was almost packed, with FTII students, industry professionals, such as veteran Dr Mohan Agashe, and members of the public — who had waited for the film after hearing reviews from this year’s MAMI — crowding the hall.
Humans in the Loop is about an Adivasi woman who returns to her ancestral, tribal village in remote Jharkhand with two children after her divorce.
She begins work as a data labeller, i.e. training artificial intelligence (AI) models to recognise objects in images and videos.
Even as her relationship with her daughter nosedives, the protagonist notices that AI has dangerous biases and at stake is the future of people like her in a world governed by advancing technology.
The film opens with a shot of a child lying on grass, when something moves near her.
Through partially closed eyes, she looks up and sees a porcupine in front.
The porcupine, who looks as if it is familiar with the girl, turns out to be a leitmotif in the drama that the family soon finds itself in.
Sahay’s story is tiered, with parent-child relationships and the human-technology interface, but it also documents a moment when history is becoming the future.
Remnants of India’s colonial past
The Mumbai-based filmmaker, who travelled across Jharkhand and spent seven to eight months there, came across remnants of India’s colonial past, in the form of old single-gauge trains and old arches.
“These stood out very poignantly and, when I looked closely, I realised that there was a similarity between what was happening with AI and colonialism,” says Sahay.
“AI has been trained in skills like differentiating between things. But the data that AI is being trained on is primarily data by caucasians from the First World. In several websites using AI-generated art models, even if you search for an Indian representation, you will get a fair-skinned person. Some 300 years ago, foreigners came and settled in these parts to govern and to extract minerals. They looked upon tribals as savages and denoted them as criminal tribes, among others. Now, with the advent of AI trained on the same First-World data, there is a possibility of that kind of thing repeating,” he adds.
The son of sociologists, Sahay, whose first name means forest, researched deeply for the film.
The idea for the subject had come to him through an article by journalist Karishma Malhotra, “Human Touch”, which spoke about Adivasi women carrying out data labelling.
‘Project was an immense struggle’
Despite an impressive CV– Sahay has directed five short films, of which Songs for Babasaheb and Chait have screened at Mumbai International Film Festival (MAMI), Signs Films Festival, and Jaffna Film Festival, and another film Saaya was selected as a ‘Film Bazaar Recommends’ project – the filmmaker found this project to be “an immense struggle”.
There was a fund crunch and the rigour of trekking 13-15 km everyday to find the right performers and locations, among others.
“The experience made me more tenacious. I learned to hold my ground in extremely difficult working conditions. I would just like to say that I would not have it any other way. It had to be this difficult for it to turn out so well,” he says.
“Even at FTII, any film that caused me difficulties, turned out quite well,” he adds.
FTII was Sahay’s lifechanger.
“The institution itself, our peers, and the screenings were fantastic. In the faculty, some were good and some not so much but the screenings and the films that we watched together and discussed compensated for everything,” he says.
Sahay was at FTII around 2018 when “there was a disdain towards protest and people bringing their issues up. But, that is also part of being a student – you being idealistic and wanting what you rightly deserve,” he says.
