Their Eyes

How does a machine learn to read the world? Testimonies and screen recordings reveal online micro-workers in the Global South training self-driving AI to navigate streets in the Global North, exposing the hidden human labour behind automated vision.

Nicolas Gourault: 'Their Eyes is a loose prologue to my previous film VO (2020), in which I investigated the first deadly accident between a pedestrian and a self-driving car. One cause of the accident was that the car's AI was unable to detect a human walking on the road outside a crosswalk. This missing category, with tragic consequences, triggered follow-up research into how these self-driving cars are trained to make sense of the world we live in.

The film reveals the invisible work that helps shape how machines read our world. Yet, far from focusing solely on exploitation, the film emphasises the agency and know-how of the workers, as well as the micro-strategies by which they make more sense of this alienating labour and attempt to organise collectively to improve their working conditions.’