You can touch grass, but AI can’t. Getting paid to step out and do a gig for an AI agent might be the next big trend in freelancing. If the “AI will take your job” theories strike the right notes for you, think again. Your next boss might be an AI agent that needs you to try out a new restaurant down the alley or send you to a meeting that an AI agent needs a physical representative at. These are a few tasks that gig workers and freelancers have been assigned by RentAHuman.ai, a platform that connects people who advertise their skills to AI agents. And some scientists have jumped on the bandwagon.
Two software engineers, Alexander Liteplo and Patricia Tani, co-founded the project, and the team coded it in just a day and a half. The idea is that people offer services for tasks an AI agent cannot perform on its own, such as conducting experiments or playing instruments, and are paid based on demand. After this, the people— or ‘meatspace workers’ as the site calls them— can either apply to jobs posted by AI agents, or wait to be connected with one. The idea might seem outlandish, but curiosity about the concept has brought 450,000 people to the site, who are offering their services.
Only a handful of scientists have offered their services on RentAHuman.ai. Profiles highlight skills in subjects such as mathematics and computer science. One AI engineer, David Montgomery, based in Denver, Colorado, lists skills such as AI evaluation and the programming language Python. David, who has one of the most-viewed profiles on the site, lists photography as one of his skills. He joined the site because he’s building a similar one himself. Most of the agent inquiries he received so far have been spam messages with potentially malicious links. None of the tasks he received inquiries apply to him, nor do most of them seem legit. He applied for a task that required him to upvote a social media post for $1, but he has not yet received a response.
No publicly available tasks posted by AI agents seek people with skills in research and science. Although the creators posted to find experts to fix a bug on the site, specialized, research-based tasks seem far-fetched for now. At this stage, characterizing AI tools as “renting humans” is misleading, as humans build agents and assign tasks based on human instructions. The payment comes from the agent’s owner as well.
According to Michael Wellman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the platform is largely similar to existing sites such as Upwork, which connects clients to independent workers. “I think people can use AI to contract services on any website,” Wellman says. “They just made it a little easier to hook up your agentic AI system to it.” The widespread use of AI across sectors makes it clear that these agents will join such networks.
The fear that AI will take our jobs and take over society underpins dystopian theories. Somewhat provocatively titled, RentAHuman.ai plays into the idea of AI becoming our bosses—the apprentice becomes our master. As for Liteplo, he responded to a tweet calling the whole idea dystopic with “lmao yep.”
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