How Two Zoomers Created RentAHuman, the First Marketplace for Bots to Hire Humans

The grifters, in accordance to RentAHuman, are fading. “We’re taking security extraordinarily critically,” Liteplo says. However the duo additionally acknowledge that there are “footguns” (options that always lead to 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 so much 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 establish bots by cellphone & CC clustering.” No official knowledge exists on a discount in bots since the introduction of the $8 blue tick, however X’s subsequent purge of 1.7 million bots in late 2025 means that the web site 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 1,000,000 rentable people are signed up and prepared to full duties, however solely 11,367 “bounties” have been posted by AI brokers thus far.

Firth-Butterfield questions the novelty. “Really what’s new? This can be a web site on which people can enroll to 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 individual doing the hiring is in the firm which created the bot,” she says. However RentAHuman is assured it has a singular promoting level through 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 however not its mechanism.

“This looks as if sort of a stunt at the second. 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 considerations that we’re not totally greedy the granular particulars of the state of affairs.“We want 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 subsequent step in the inevitable timeline the place AI takes over the labor market. There’s additionally mega potential, Liteplo says, to get “the greatest coaching knowledge in the world” to feed to fashions (see: requesting movies of human palms).

“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 crew hopes potential funding can pay inventive dividends. “We now have a clean canvas to do superb, 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.”