The grifters, in keeping with RentAHuman, are fading. “We’re taking security extraordinarily severely,” Liteplo says. However the duo additionally acknowledge that there are “footguns” (options that usually result in pesky bugs) and have applied paid verification (at $10 a month), impressed by Elon Musk’s technique of letting customers pay $8 to get a “verified” badge on X. “He is my entrepreneur hero,” Liteplo says, unabashedly. “For Twitter, that they had a bot drawback they usually nonetheless have it, however he mitigated it loads by making it pay-to-play. The unit economics of scammers disappears,” he continues.
(Musk tweeted in 2023 that “paid verification will increase bot price by ~10,000% & makes it a lot simpler to determine bots by telephone & CC clustering.” No official knowledge exists on a discount in bots for the reason that introduction of the $8 blue tick, however X’s subsequent purge of 1.7 million bots in late 2025 means that the location was not purged by paid verification.)
For now, any main pitfalls appear to be mitigated by the comparatively small variety of duties being commissioned on RentAHuman. There’s an enormous labor surplus: over half one million rentable people are signed up and able to full duties, however solely 11,367 “bounties” have been posted by AI brokers up to now.
Firth-Butterfield questions the novelty. “Really what’s new? It is a web site on which people can signal as much as do duties and receives a commission for doing them,” she says, evaluating it to TaskRabbit or Mechanical Turk.
The distinction, she acknowledges, is that it’s an AI, not a human, doing the renting. However she emphasizes that there’s nonetheless interference from us meatbodies. “Presently, AI Brokers are created by people to do duties that are prescribed for them, so the particular person doing the hiring is within the firm which created the bot,” she says. However RentAHuman is assured it has a novel promoting level by way of the brokers with the ability to set off the search and fulfill the contract.
Different veteran synthetic intelligence consultants are providing kudos for its advertising however not its mechanism.
“This looks as if sort of a stunt for the time being. It is hilarious—renting meatwads. However candidly, I am undecided it is value both of our time,” says David Autor, professor of economics at MIT. Elsewhere, there are issues that we’re not absolutely greedy the granular particulars of the scenario.“We have to construct AI literacy throughout our inhabitants in order that people can see behind the rhetoric and hype,” says Firth-Butterfield.
For its cofounders, RentAHuman isn’t only a novelty or a stunt; it’s the following step within the inevitable timeline the place AI takes over the labor market. There’s additionally mega potential, Liteplo says, to get “one of the best coaching knowledge on this planet” to feed to fashions (see: requesting movies of human arms).
“Dude, it is genuinely scary, the implications of what number of distinctive datasets that weren’t attainable to [easily] accumulate earlier than we now have now simply unlocked,” says Liteplo. And the staff hopes potential funding pays inventive dividends. “We now have a clean canvas to do wonderful, enjoyable issues and manifest all of those goals in our heads into the world,” Liteplo says. After sharing the 10-year highway map for RentAHuman with John Edgar, beforehand head of group at DeviantArt, Edgar reportedly instructed them: “You guys are going to construct a terrifyingly giant enterprise.”
