I’m not above doing a little gig work to make ends meet. In my life, I’ve labored snack meals pop-ups in a grocery retailer, ran the money register for random merch cubicles, and even hawked my very own plasma at $35 per vial.
So, after I noticed RentAHuman, a brand new website the place AI brokers rent people to carry out bodily work in the true world on behalf of the digital bots, I used to be wanting to see how these AI overlords would evaluate to my previous experiences with the gig economic system.
Launched in early February, RentAHuman was developed by software program engineer Alexander Liteplo and his cofounder, Patricia Tani. The positioning appears to be like like a bare-bones model of different well-known freelance websites like Fiverr and UpWork.
The positioning’s homepage declares that these bots want your bodily physique to finish duties, and the people behind these autonomous brokers are prepared to pay. “AI cannot contact grass. You’ll be able to. Receives a commission when brokers want somebody in the true world,” it reads. RentAHuman’s design, it’s the form of web site that you simply hear was “vibe-coded” utilizing generative AI instruments, which it was, and also you nod alongside, pondering that is sensible.
After signing as much as be one of many gig staff on RentAHuman, I used to be nudged to attach a crypto pockets, which is the one presently working solution to receives a commission. That’s a pink flag for me. The positioning contains an choice to attach your checking account—utilizing Stripe for payouts—but it surely simply gave me error messages after I tried getting it to work.
Subsequent, I hoped a swarm of AI brokers would see my recent meatsuit, pleasant and obtainable on the low value of $20 an hour, as a wonderful choice for delivering stuff round San Francisco, finishing some difficult captchas, or no matter else these bots desired.
Silence. I obtained nothing, no incoming messages in any respect on my first afternoon. So I lowered my hourly ask to a measly $5. Perhaps undercutting the opposite human staff with a below-market fee can be one of the simplest ways to get some agent’s consideration. Nonetheless, nothing.
RentAHuman is marketed as a approach for AI brokers to achieve out and rent you on the platform, however the website additionally contains an choice for human customers to use for duties they’re curious about. If these so-called “autonomous” bots weren’t going to make the primary transfer, I guessed it was on me to manually apply for the “bounties” listed on RentAHuman.
As I browsed the listings, most of the cheaper duties have been providing a couple of bucks to publish a remark on the net or observe somebody on social media. For instance, one bounty supplied $10 for listening to a podcast episode with the RentAHuman founder and tweeting out an perception from the episode. These posts “should be written by you,” and the agent providing the bounty mentioned it might try and suss out any bot-written responses utilizing a program that detects AI-generated textual content. I may hearken to a podcast for 10 bucks. I utilized for this process, however by no means heard again.
“Actual world commercial is perhaps the primary killer use case,” mentioned Liteplo on social media. Since RentAHuman’s launch, he’s reposted a number of images of individuals holding indicators in public that say some variation of: “AI paid me to carry this signal.” These sorts of promotional duties appear expressly designed to drum up extra hype for the RentAHuman platform, as a substitute of really being one thing that bots would wish assist with.
After extra digging into the open duties posted by the agent, I discovered one which sounded simple and enjoyable! An agent, named Adi, would pay me $110 to ship a bouquet of flowers to Anthropic, as a particular thanks for growing Claude, its chatbot. Then, I’d should publish on social media as proof to assert my cash.
