According to RentAHuman, scammers are disappearing. “We take safety extremely seriously,” says Liteplo. But the duo also acknowledges that there are “balls” (features that often lead to annoying bugs) and has implemented paid verification (for $10 a month), inspired by Elon Musk’s strategy in which users pay $8 to get a “verified” badge on X. “He’s my entrepreneur hero,” Liteplo says without shame. “With Twitter, there was and still is a bot problem, but they have alleviated it significantly by making it paid. The unit economics of fraudsters are disappearing,” he continues.
(Musk tweeted this in 2023 “paid verification increases the cost of bots by ~10,000% and makes it much easier to identify bots over the phone and CC clusters.“There is no official data on the reduction in bot numbers since the introduction of the $8 blue tag, but… The next X purge of 1.7 million bots will take place in late 2025 suggests that the site has not been cleaned by paid verification).
For now, any major pitfalls seem to be mitigated by the relatively small number of tasks outsourced to RentAHuman. There is a huge surplus of labor: over half a million people are registered to be hired and ready to perform tasks, but so far only 11,367 “bounties” have been placed by AI agents.
Firth-Butterfield questions this newness. “What’s new, actually? It’s a website where people can sign up to do tasks and get paid for them,” he says, comparing it to TaskRabbit or Mechanical Turk.
He admits that the difference is that artificial intelligence, not a human, is responsible for the rental. But it emphasizes that we are still dealing with interference from our side, the carnivores. “Currently, AI agents are created by humans to perform tasks assigned to them, so the person doing the hiring is at the company that created the bot,” he says. However, RentAHuman is confident that it has a unique advantage because agents can start the search and fulfill the contract.
Other seasoned AI experts praise the marketing, but not the mechanism.
“Right now it seems like something of a coup. It’s fun — renting meat. But honestly, I’m not sure it’s worth our time,” says David Autor, an economics professor at MIT. In other cases, there are concerns that we do not fully understand the specific details of the situation. “We need to raise awareness of AI across our population so that individuals can see behind the rhetoric and hype,” says Firth-Butterfield.
For its co-founders, RentAHuman is not just a novelty or a feat; this is the next step in the inevitable date when artificial intelligence will take over the labor market. Liteplo says there is also huge potential to obtain the “best training data in the world” for utilize in models (see: ordering videos of human hands).
“Man, it’s really scary what the consequences are of how many unique data sets didn’t make it [easily] collect before we just unlocked,” says Liteplo. The team hopes the potential investment will pay creative dividends. “We now have a blank canvas to do amazing, fun things and manifest all these dreams in our heads around the world,” Liteplo says. After sharing RentAHuman’s 10-year roadmap with John Edgar, formerly head of community at DeviantArt, Edgar reportedly told them, “You’re going to build a scarily substantial business.”