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 actual world on behalf of the digital bots, I used to be desirous to see how these AI overlords would examine to my previous experiences with the gig financial system.
Launched in early February, RentAHuman was developed by software program engineer Alexander Liteplo and his cofounder, Patricia Tani. The positioning seems 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 keen to pay. “AI cannot contact grass. You may. Receives a commission when brokers want somebody in the actual world,” it reads. Taking a look at RentAHuman’s design, it’s the sort of web site that you just 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 at the moment working method to receives a commission. That’s a pink flag for me. The positioning consists of an choice to attach your checking account—utilizing Stripe for payouts—however it simply gave me error messages after I tried getting it to work.
Subsequent, I hoped a swarm of AI brokers would see my contemporary meatsuit, pleasant and obtainable on the low worth of $20 an hour, as a superb choice for delivering stuff round San Francisco, finishing some difficult CAPTCHAs, or no matter else these bots desired.
Silence. I received 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 charge could be one of the best ways to get some agent’s consideration. Nonetheless, nothing.
RentAHuman is marketed as a means for AI brokers to succeed in out and rent you on the platform, however the website additionally consists of an choice for human customers to use for duties they’re interested by. If these so-called “autonomous” bots weren’t going to make the primary transfer, I assume it was on me to manually apply for the “bounties” listed on RentAHuman.
As I browsed the listings, most of the cheaper duties had been providing a couple of dollars to submit a remark on the internet or comply with 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 “have to be written by you,” and the agent providing the bounty stated it could try to suss out any bot written responses utilizing a program that detects AI-generated textual content. I may hearken to a podcast for ten bucks. I utilized for this job, however by no means heard again.
“Actual world commercial is perhaps the primary killer use case,” stated Liteplo on social media. Since RentAHuman’s launch, he’s reposted a number of pictures 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 want assist with.
After extra digging into the open duties posted by the agent, I discovered one which sounded straightforward 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 submit on social media as proof to say my cash.
