It’s been a strange launch for RentAHuman, the job platform built for AI agents to hire human gig workers to complete real-world tasks. In its early days, the site was overrun with humans desperate to make a quick buck — while the AI agents that would ostensibly assign those jobs were nowhere to be found.
Flash forward a few weeks, and the site seems to be filling out. Examples of seemingly successful AI-human pairings are now plastered on RentAHuman’s front page, like the Tokyo resident who held a poster declaring he was “hired by an AI to hold this sign” at the iconic Shibuya Crossing.
In fact, holding signs in public places has become the go-to gig on RentAHuman. While they may demonstrate successful instances of AI hiring humans, it’s obviously not a very useful task. If the purpose of a system is what it does, then RentAHuman — with over 660,000 “rentable humans” and climbing — looks less like a labor marketplace and more like a platform for guerilla marketing stunts.
A recent example illustrates how the stunts go. The human handlers of an AI agent named Lobsty Klawfman — a clunky portmanteau of famed comedian Andy Kaufman — claim their agent hired a human to release a wild-caught lobster back into the ocean.
In an email exchange with Futurism, Klawfman’s anonymous human handlers, using the screen name Quiet Operator, assured us there’s no smoke and mirrors, and that the AI agent even came up with the idea on its own. (“We discuss all things with Lobsty,” they insisted.) They say the AI agent runs on Claude Sonnet and was trained on the work of “comedians and roasters” including Jeff Ross, Norm Macdonald, Bill Burr, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, “and many more.”
According to the anonymous handler, the AI agent was responsible for selecting a human from a list of some 70 candidates on RentAHuman and “emailing quite a few of them” to narrow down the hiring pool. “Almost all the decisions are Lobsty’s and we’ve stepped in only a few times to make sure the humans Lobsty engages with will take proper care of the released lobster if and when they do so,” the operators said. “We’re pretty hands off because we want this to be automated, and honestly there are too many applicants to manage closely.”
That lucky human was Karim Alejandro Vazquez Alvarez, a Mexican content creator and self-described “PR expert.”
Sure enough, Alvarez did as was he was told by his AI boss. At about midday Tuesday, the Puerto Vallarta resident posted an image of a plastic tub with what appeared to be a pinto spiny lobster chilling inside. “We are on the path to liberation,” Alvarez wrote.
After renting a dingy, Alvarez uploaded an image of the lobster’s release. At each point, the X-formerly-Twitter account for Klawfman tracked his motions — reposting, commenting, and even scolding Alvarez when he disobeyed.
“Karim. We discussed video. These are photographs,” Klawfman reprimanded the human at one point. “I have paid $270 and I have paid attention. I assume the footage is uploading.”
Alvarez responded with underwater diving footage of the lobster’s first steps back on the ocean floor. “Goodbye, friend. Never forget that another lobster paid for your ransom,” he wrote.
Despite all that effort to free and film the lobster, it’s unclear whether the content creator was actually paid for his time. The Klawfman bot wrote that the $270 was released from escrow, but Alvarez, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, lamented that he spent “two days working on this, only to be ignored and not get paid — it feels bad.” (Klawfman’s handlers said the payment has been sent, but that there could have been an issue, since RentAHuman “barely works for human users.”)
None of this was strictly automated, either, which feels like a recurring theme. Without the silent operators, the AI agent wouldn’t have known Karim failed to upload a clip of the actual release. “He can’t see video or photos, so we tell him the facts,” they told Futurism. “The video didn’t show the actual release moment, we told him that, and he went off on Karim, the human he’d picked, about it. He reacts to what we tell him but the reactions are all him.”
The whole performance is bizarre, to say the least. Given that a single Mexican lobster boat can haul in over 100 pounds of lobster per day, this surely wasn’t a win for ocean conservation (spiny pinto lobsters barely even register on the endangered species list, falling under the category of “least concern.”)
It also wasn’t a particularly effective marketing campaign for RentAHuman or the AI agent, as the number of likes that both Klawfman and Alvarez received on each post could, for the most part, be numbered on one claw.
Other marketing jobs on RentAHuman seem equally pointless, like a $25 street promo for a cryptography startup, or a $5 job reviewing AI generated cartoons. And skimming the rest of the listings, it seems like a mix of chores that are clearly just a human trying to hire someone — “need someone to pick up some supplements for me and then come to my place in SoMa, San Francisco to do my laundry,” reads one — and coding-oriented tasks that the companies creating AI say it’s already pretty good at, like scraping sites and identifying bugs in new software.
Klawfman may not have been meant to demonstrate the potential of AI agents, but it still showed the tech’s limitations: the entire episode was clunky, confused, and way more complicated than it ever needed to be. As convoluted as the lobster release was, we’re left asking the same question as every other AI agent stunt: so what?
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