Their Eyes

“We are basically their eyes, but it is like we don’t exist.”

These are the words of one of the interviewees from Nicolas Gourault’s new film, Their Eyes, in which ‘clickworkers’ from the Philippines, Kenya, and Venezuela discuss their jobs assessing imagery from self-driving cars and annotated them to teach the artificial intelligence what it is looking at. This is not Gourault’s first film that has engaged with this subject, having made the fantastic short VO (2020) which was about the human workers training driverless cars. In this instance, the labour is one step further removed, but the film delves into the inequality inherent in the system of labour as well as some of the chilling ways in which this information is being organised.

The work itself is a time-intensive but straightforward. The workers are sent images and tasked with ‘segmentation’ which involves using their mouse to outline the shapes of people, vehicles, buildings, vegetation and other objects within the frame and labelling each one. This process allows for some interesting visuals for Gourault, which overlay the real world with this bright Dayglo colours, almost making the film appear at first glance like animation. Yellow buildings rise into a pink sky while blue cars drift down a highway.

Through the voiceovers of several workers, the audience learns what will hardly be a surprise – that workers are exploited in the harvesting of this data, with workers in Venezuela paid $0.20 per task while workers in the US receive $2.00 for the same work. Some have tried to find ways around this – by using VPNs to increase their pay – but one voice suggests the situation is scarcely better than slavery.

Perhaps more chilling are the instructions given to these workers about how to classify what is on screen: in one sequence a worker explains that while police officers marshalling a protest should be annotated as ‘human’, the protestors should not be. More alarming still, people covered in sheets – such as rough-sleepers – should be classified as ‘objects.’ Their Eyes is an engaging film and visually interesting, but more importantly a stark reminder of the huge inequality that is baked into so much technological progress.

Director, graphics: Nicolas Gourault
Cast: Oliver, Elvina, Yvon, Yonaille, Jonel
Producers: Quentin Brayer, Yannick Beauquis
Editing: Lucas Azemar, Felix Rehm, Nicolas Gourault
Sound: Romain Ozanne, Etienne Andre
Production companies: Don Quichotte Films (France)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (European Short Film Competition)
In English, Spanish
23 minutes

Read our coverage of more short films in our Verdict Shorts section.