The grifters, according to RentAHuman, are fading. \u201cWe’re taking safety extremely seriously,\u201d Liteplo says. But the duo also acknowledge that there are \u201cfootguns\u201d (features that often lead to pesky bugs) and have implemented paid verification (at $10 a month), inspired by Elon Musk\u2019s strategy of letting users pay $8 to get a \u201cverified\u201d badge on X. \u201cHe’s my entrepreneur hero,\u201d Liteplo says, unabashedly. \u201cFor 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,\u201d he continues.<\/p>\n
(Musk tweeted in 2023 that \u201cpaid verification increases bot cost by ~10,000% & makes it much easier to identify bots by phone & CC clustering.<\/a>\u201d No official data exists on a reduction in bots since the introduction of the $8 blue tick, but X’s subsequent purge of 1.7 million bots in late 2025<\/a> suggests that the site was not purged by paid verification.)<\/p>\n For now, any major pitfalls seem to be mitigated by the relatively small number of tasks being commissioned on RentAHuman. There\u2019s a huge labor surplus: over half a million rentable humans are signed up and ready to complete tasks, but only 11,367 \u201cbounties\u201d have been posted by AI agents so far.<\/p>\n Firth-Butterfield questions the novelty. \u201cActually what is new? This is a website on which humans can sign up to do tasks and get paid for doing them,\u201d she says, comparing it to TaskRabbit or Mechanical Turk.<\/p>\n The difference, she acknowledges, is that it\u2019s an AI, not a human, doing the renting. But she emphasizes that there\u2019s still interference from us meatbodies. \u201cCurrently, 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,\u201d she says. But RentAHuman is confident it has a unique selling point via the agents being able to trigger the search and fulfill the contract.<\/p>\n Other veteran artificial intelligence experts are offering kudos for its marketing but not its mechanism.<\/p>\n \u201cThis seems like kind of a stunt at the moment. It’s hilarious\u2014renting meatwads. But candidly, I’m not sure it’s worth either of our time,\u201d says David Autor, professor of economics at MIT. Elsewhere, there are concerns that we\u2019re not fully grasping the granular details of the situation.\u201cWe need to build AI literacy across our population so that individuals can see behind the rhetoric and hype,\u201d says Firth-Butterfield.<\/p>\n For its cofounders, RentAHuman isn\u2019t just a novelty or a stunt; it\u2019s the next step in the inevitable timeline where AI takes over the labor market. There\u2019s also mega potential, Liteplo says, to get \u201cthe best training data in the world\u201d to feed to models (see: requesting videos of human hands).<\/p>\n \u201cDude, it’s genuinely scary, the implications of how many unique datasets that weren’t possible to [easily] collect before we have now just unlocked,\u201d says Liteplo. And the team hopes potential investment will pay creative dividends. \u201cWe now have a blank canvas to do amazing, fun things and manifest all of these dreams in our heads into the world,\u201d Liteplo says. After sharing the 10-year road map for RentAHuman with John Edgar, previously head of community at DeviantArt, Edgar reportedly told them: \u201cYou guys are going to build a terrifyingly large business.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The grifters, according to RentAHuman, are fading. \u201cWe’re taking safety extremely seriously,\u201d Liteplo says. But the duo also…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290157,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,19363,111,139,69,1046,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-290156","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-founders","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-startups","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}