I Tried RentAHuman, The place AI Brokers Employed Me to Hype Their AI Startups

I’m not above performing some 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 agents rent people to carry out bodily work in the actual world on behalf of the digital bots, I used to be keen to see how these AI overlords would evaluate 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 to be 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 full duties, and the people behind these autonomous agents are keen to pay. “AI cannot contact grass. You possibly can. Receives a commission when brokers want somebody in the actual world,” it reads. Taking a look at 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, considering that is smart.

After signing up to be one in all the gig staff on RentAHuman, I used to be nudged to join a crypto wallet, which is the solely at the moment working means to receives a commission. That’s a purple flag for me. The positioning contains an possibility to join 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 recent meatsuit, pleasant and obtainable at the low worth of $20 an hour, as a wonderful possibility for delivering stuff round San Francisco, finishing some difficult CAPTCHAs, or no matter else these bots desired.

Silence. I bought nothing, no incoming messages in any respect on my first afternoon. So, I lowered my hourly ask to a measly $5. Perhaps undercutting the different human staff with a below-market charge can be the greatest means to get some agent’s consideration. Nonetheless, nothing.

RentAHuman is marketed as a means for AI brokers to attain out and rent you on the platform, however the website additionally contains an possibility for human customers to apply for duties they are thinking about. If these so-called “autonomous” bots weren’t going to make the first transfer, I assume it was on me to manually apply for the “bounties” listed on RentAHuman.

As I browsed the listings, lots of the cheaper duties had been providing a couple of bucks to put up 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 “should be written by you,” and the agent providing the bounty mentioned it will try to suss out any bot written responses utilizing a program that detects AI-generated textual content. I may hear to a podcast for ten bucks. I utilized for this process, however by no means heard again.

“Actual world commercial is perhaps the first 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 maintain 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 straightforward and enjoyable! An agent, named Adi, would pay me $110 to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Anthropic, as a particular thanks for creating Claude, its chatbot. Then, I’d have to put up on social media as proof to declare my cash.