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

The grifters, in keeping with RentAHuman, are fading. “We’re taking safety extremely seriously,” Liteplo says. But the duo additionally acknowledge that there are “footguns” (options that usually 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’s my entrepreneur hero,” Liteplo says, unabashedly. “For Twitter, they had a bot problem and they still have it, but he mitigated it a lot by making it pay-to-play. The unit economics of scammers disappears,” he continues.

(Musk tweeted in 2023 that “paid verification increases bot cost by ~10,000% & makes it much easier to identify bots by phone & CC clustering.” No official information exists on a discount in bots because the 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 1,000,000 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. “Actually what is new? This is a website on which humans can sign up to do tasks and get paid 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. But she emphasizes that there’s nonetheless interference from us meatbodies. “Currently, AI Agents are created by humans to do tasks which are prescribed for them, so the person doing the hiring is in the company which created the bot,” she says. But RentAHuman is assured it has a singular promoting level through the brokers having the ability to set off the search and fulfill the contract.

Other veteran synthetic intelligence specialists are providing kudos for its advertising however not its mechanism.

“This seems like kind of a stunt at the moment. It’s hilarious—renting meatwads. But candidly, I’m not sure it’s worth either of our time,” says David Autor, professor of economics at MIT. Elsewhere, there are issues that we’re not totally greedy the granular particulars of the scenario.“We need to build AI literacy across our population so that individuals 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 “the best training data in the world” to feed to fashions (see: requesting movies of human fingers).

“Dude, it’s genuinely scary, the implications of how many unique datasets that weren’t possible to [easily] collect before we have now just unlocked,” says Liteplo. And the group hopes potential funding pays artistic dividends. “We now have a blank canvas to do amazing, fun things and manifest all of these dreams 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 informed them: “You guys are going to build a terrifyingly large business.”