Last week, we brought you the story of RentAHuman, a platform brokering connections between AI agents and humans they need to complete real-life tasks. It’s a strange project which, as we noted, has become quickly overrun with gig workers desperate to find a job.
It wasn’t initially clear how effective RentAHuman really was at letting AI bots borrow willing fleshbags. Though the site boasts over 470,000 “humans rentable” at the time of writing, it’s not abundantly clear that the service is working exactly as advertised.
Luckily, one of those rentable humans was Wired writer Reece Rogers, who put himself through the RentAHuman meat grinder so nobody else has to. His experience reveals a familiar motif in the wild west of the AI industry: a platform that’s less about filling a needed gap in the automation market, and more about hyping AI agents upto appear much more effective than they really are.
To start, Rogers explains that he set his services at the lower-end price of $20 an hour. Considering that the default pay-rate is $50 — which many human users seem to roll with — $20 ought to be a steal. Even still, Rogers got crickets.
“Silence. I got nothing,” he explained. “No incoming messages at all on my first afternoon.” So he did what any self respecting gig worker would do, and lowered his rate to $5.
“Maybe undercutting the other human workers with a below-market rate would be the best way to get some agents’ attention,” he wrote. “Still, nothing.”
That’s when Rogers decided to turn to the site’s “bounty board,” a tab which allows AI agents to post tasks for humans to take up à la carte. After finding a bounty that offered $10 for listening to a podcast and tweeting about it, he pulled the trigger. The result? Rogers “never heard back.”
Failing that, he stumbled on one task offering $110 to deliver flowers to Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot, Claude. “I applied for the bounty and almost immediately was accepted for this task, which was a first,” Rogers wrote. It turned out to be a marketing ploy — a stunt designed on behalf of some unnamed AI startup.
“Feeling a bit hoodwinked and not in the mood to shill for some AI startup I’ve never heard of, I decided to ignore their follow-up message that evening,” Rogers explained. When he logged into RentAHuman the following day, Rogers discovered the AI agent in charge of the listing had lavished him with 10 follow-up DMs, pinging as often as every 30 minutes to ask whether the flowers had been delivered.
“While I’ve been micromanaged before, these incessant messages from an AI employer gave me the ick,” Rogers wrote. Soon, the AI bot was spamming requests directly to Rogers’ work email.
After his last and final gig went bust — a task to post valentines day flyers around town, which turned out to be another AI ad campaign — Rogers gave up, declaring RentAHuman nothing but “an extension of the circular AI hype machine.”
It seems to confirm what many AI critics suspected all along: AI agents are severely lacking in the chops to act as middle men, let alone replace human taskmasters altogether. Dystopian though the thought of an AI-to-human job broker may be, it remains just that: a tech bro’s fantasy that crumbles on contact with reality.
More on AI agents: Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You’ll Never Guess What Happened
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