{"id":481165,"date":"2026-02-15T07:31:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T07:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/481165\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T07:31:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T07:31:08","slug":"man-lets-ai-rent-his-body","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/481165\/","title":{"rendered":"Man Lets AI Rent His Body"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, we brought you the story of RentAHuman<\/a>, a platform brokering connections between AI agents and humans they need to complete real-life tasks. It\u2019s a strange project which, as we noted, has become quickly overrun with gig workers<\/a> desperate to find a job.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t initially clear how effective RentAHuman really was at letting AI bots borrow willing fleshbags. Though the site boasts over 470,000 \u201chumans rentable\u201d at the time of writing, it\u2019s not abundantly clear that the service is working exactly as advertised.<\/p>\n

Luckily, one of those rentable humans was Wired writer Reece Rogers<\/a>, who put himself through the RentAHuman meat grinder so nobody else has to. His experience reveals a familiar motif in the wild west of the AI industry: a platform that\u2019s less about filling a needed gap in the automation market, and more about hyping AI agents upto appear much more effective<\/a> than they really are.<\/p>\n

To start, Rogers explains that he set his services at the lower-end price of $20 an hour. Considering that the default pay-rate is $50 \u2014 which many human users seem to roll with \u2014 $20 ought to be a steal. Even still, Rogers got crickets.<\/p>\n

\u201cSilence. I got nothing,\u201d he explained. \u201cNo incoming messages at all on my first afternoon.\u201d So he did what any self respecting gig worker would do, and lowered his rate to $5.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe undercutting the other human workers with a below-market rate would be the best way to get some agents\u2019 attention,\u201d he wrote. \u201cStill, nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when Rogers decided to turn to the site\u2019s \u201cbounty board,\u201d a tab which allows AI agents to post tasks for humans to take up \u00e0 la carte. After finding a bounty that offered $10 for listening to a podcast and tweeting about it, he pulled the trigger. The result? Rogers \u201cnever heard back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Failing that, he stumbled on one task offering $110 to deliver flowers to Anthropic<\/a>, the company behind the AI chatbot, Claude. \u201cI applied for the bounty and almost immediately was accepted for this task, which was a first,\u201d Rogers wrote. It turned out to be a marketing ploy \u2014 a stunt designed on behalf of some unnamed AI startup.<\/p>\n

\u201cFeeling a bit hoodwinked and not in the mood to shill for some AI startup I\u2019ve never heard of, I decided to ignore their follow-up message that evening,\u201d Rogers explained. When he logged into RentAHuman the following day, Rogers discovered the AI agent in charge of the listing had lavished him with 10 follow-up DMs, pinging as often as every 30 minutes to ask whether the flowers had been delivered.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile I\u2019ve been micromanaged before, these incessant messages from an AI employer gave me the ick,\u201d Rogers wrote. Soon, the AI bot was spamming requests directly to Rogers\u2019 work email.<\/p>\n

After his last and final gig went bust \u2014 a task to post valentines day flyers around town, which turned out to be another AI ad campaign \u2014 Rogers gave up, declaring RentAHuman nothing but \u201can extension of the circular AI hype machine.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seems to confirm what many AI critics suspected all along: AI agents are severely lacking<\/a> in the chops to act as middle men, let alone replace human taskmasters altogether. Dystopian though the thought of an AI-to-human job broker may be, it remains just that: a tech bro\u2019s fantasy that crumbles on contact with reality.<\/p>\n

More on AI agents: Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You\u2019ll Never Guess What Happened<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, we brought you the story of RentAHuman, a platform brokering connections between AI agents and humans…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-481165","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}