The grifters, based on RentAHuman, are fading. “We’re taking security extraordinarily severely,” Liteplo says. However the duo additionally acknowledge that there are “footguns” (options that always result in pesky bugs) and have carried out 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 downside and so they nonetheless have it, however he mitigated it lots by making it pay-to-play. The unit economics of scammers disappears,” he continues.
(Musk tweeted in 2023 that “paid verification will increase bot value by ~10,000% & makes it a lot simpler to establish bots by telephone & CC clustering.” No official information 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 positioning 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 to date.
Firth-Butterfield questions the novelty. “Truly what’s new? This can be 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. “At the moment, 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 singular promoting level by way of the brokers having the ability to set off the search and fulfill the contract.
Different veteran synthetic intelligence consultants are providing kudos for its advertising and marketing however not its mechanism.
“This looks like type of a stunt in the mean time. 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 information on the planet” to feed to fashions (see: requesting movies of human fingers).
“Dude, it is genuinely scary, the implications of what number of distinctive datasets that weren’t doable to [easily] gather earlier than we have now now simply unlocked,” says Liteplo. And the group hopes potential funding can pay 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 street map for RentAHuman with John Edgar, beforehand head of neighborhood at DeviantArt, Edgar reportedly advised them: “You guys are going to construct a terrifyingly giant enterprise.”