Narrative that ‘AI is like a child’ dangerously obscures technology’s real-world implications

“AI is like a child” reads the slogan painted across the fading walls of the data annotation centre in the movie Humans in the Loop (2025), written and directed by Aranya Sahay. Inside, rows of workers sit quietly before glowing screens, creating boxes, outlining figures, and annotating labels in images and videos, one by one turning the world into data points.

Through these scenes, the film offers a quiet but powerful account of the lives of data labelers and data annotators – the deliberately invisibilised, precariously employed workers whose labor powers global AI systems. The film does an exemplary job of shifting our attention from high-profile Silicon Valley offices to the scant infrastructures of annotation centres in rural and semi-urban regions of countries like India, where workers, sitting on uncomfortable chairs and hunched over old monitors, do the painstaking task of labeling data for hours on end.

Through protagonist Nehma, an Adivasi single mother from a remote village in Jharkhand, the film unsettles our imaginations of the “tech worker”. Nehma does not match the familiar image of a coder or an engineer, and yet she painstakingly annotates low-resolution images and poor-quality videos, translating her situated knowledge into machine-readable categories.

In one instance, her knowledge of plants helps her...

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