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.
Someone wise said that technology wants to spread into every corner of our lives. AI is no different. I just wish we could skip all the hype and realize it’s a useful tool for some things, and that’s it. Just like my fridge doesn’t need to have wifi.
An agent, named Adi, would pay me $110 to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Anthropic… it was immediately clear that this was just not some bot expressing synthetic gratitude, it was another marketing ploy. This wasn’t mentioned in the listing, but the name of an AI startup was featured at the bottom of the note I was supposed to deliver with the flowers.
Remember when crypto bros did ridiculous stunts to vie for Elon Musk’s attention?
We are reaching those levels of stupid again.
mechanical turk is gonna need a new name
