"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"
"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."
"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."
RentAHuman launched in early February and was developed by Alexander Liteplo and cofounder Patricia Tani. The site resembles a bare-bones freelance marketplace similar to Fiverr and UpWork. The homepage states that bots need human bodies to complete physical tasks and offers payment when agents require real-world presence. The site appears to have been styled using generative AI 'vibe-coding.' Sign-up prompts users to connect a crypto wallet, which is currently the only working payout method; the bank-account payout option via Stripe produced error messages. Listings received little or no demand even after lowering hourly rates.
Read at WIRED
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