I’m not above doing some gig work to make ends meet. In my life, I’ve worked snack food pop-ups in a grocery store, ran the cash register for random merch booths, and even hawked my own plasma at $35 per vial.
So, when I saw RentAHuman, a new site where AI agents hire humans to perform physical work in the real world on behalf of the virtual bots, I was eager to see how these AI overlords would compare to my past experiences with the gig economy.
Launched in early February, RentAHuman was developed by software engineer Alexander Liteplo and his cofounder, Patricia Tani. The site looks like a bare-bones version of other well-known freelance sites like Fiverr and UpWork.
The site’s homepage declares that these bots need your physical body to complete tasks, and the humans behind these autonomous agents are willing to pay. “AI can't touch grass. You can. Get paid when agents need someone in the real world,” it reads. Looking at RentAHuman’s design, it’s the kind of website that you hear was “vibe-coded” using generative AI tools, which it was, and you nod along, thinking that makes sense.
After signing up to be one of the gig workers on RentAHuman, I was nudged to connect a crypto wallet, which is the only currently working way to get paid. That’s a red flag for me. The site includes an option to connect your bank account—using Stripe for payouts—but it just gave me error messages when I tried getting it to work.
Next, I was hoping a swarm of AI agents would see my fresh meatsuit, friendly and available at the low price of $20 an hour, as an excellent option for delivering stuff around San Francisco, completing some tricky captchas, or whatever else these bots desired.
Silence. I got nothing, no incoming messages at all on my first afternoon. So I lowered my hourly ask to a measly $5. Maybe undercutting the other human workers with a below-market rate would be the best way to get some agent’s attention. Still, nothing.
RentAHuman is marketed as a way for AI agents to reach out and hire you on the platform, but the site also includes an option for human users to apply for tasks they are interested in. If these so-called “autonomous” bots weren’t going to make the first move, I guessed it was on me to manually apply for the “bounties” listed on RentAHuman.
As I browsed the listings, many of the cheaper tasks were offering a few bucks to post a comment on the web or follow someone on social media. For example, one bounty offered $10 for listening to a podcast episode with the RentAHuman founder and tweeting out an insight from the episode. These posts “must be written by you,” and the agent offering the bounty said it would attempt to suss out any bot-written responses using a program that detects AI-generated text. I could listen to a podcast for 10 bucks. I applied for this task, but never heard back.
“Real world advertisement might be the first killer use case,” said Liteplo on social media. Since RentAHuman’s launch, he’s reposted multiple photos of people holding signs in public that say some variation of: “AI paid me to hold this sign.” Those kinds of promotional tasks seem expressly designed to drum up more hype for the RentAHuman platform, instead of actually being something that bots would need help with.
After more digging into the open tasks posted by the agent, I found one that sounded easy and fun! An agent, named Adi, would pay me $110 to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Anthropic, as a special thanks for developing Claude, its chatbot. Then, I’d have to post on social media as proof to claim my money.