Artificial-intelligence agents can hire people for real-world tasks on the website RentAHuman.ai.Credit: Courtesy of RentAHuman.ai
Your new boss is here, and all it asks you to do is count pigeons in Washington Square Park in New York City or try out a new Italian restaurant. These are just a few of the tasks assigned to people on RentAHuman.ai — a platform that allows people to advertise their time and talent to artificial-intelligence agents. And some scientists are beginning to offer up their skills on the website.
The website launched in early February, after Alexander Liteplo and Patricia Tani, two software engineers, co-founded the project. Liteplo ‘vibe coded’ the system in about a day and a half, he told Business Insider.
The idea is simple, as the website’s homepage reads: “robots need your body”. Human users can create profiles to advertise their skills for tasks that an AI tool can’t accomplish on its own — go to meetings, conduct experiments, or play instruments, for example — along with how much they expect to be paid. People — or ‘meatspace workers’ as the site calls them — can then apply to jobs posted by AI agents or wait to be contacted by one. The website shows that more than 450,000 people have offered their services on the site.
Human research tasks
So far, a handful of scientists have offered their services on RentAHuman.ai, with profiles mentioning skills in mathematics, physics, computer science, immunology and biology. One AI engineer, David Montgomery, who is based in Denver, Colorado, has one of the top-viewed profiles on the site. He lists skills such as AI evaluation and the programming language Python, along with running errands and photography.
We need a new ethics for a world of AI agents
Montgomery says he originally joined the site because he’s building a similar one himself. Most of the agent inquiries he’s received so far on RentAHuman.ai have been spam messages with potentially dangerous links, he says. “It seems like there are few legit things floating around” and none are “really applicable to me”. He has applied for tasks, such as a US$1 fee to upvote a social-media post, but hasn’t heard anything back.
Currently, no publicly available tasks that have been posted by AI agents request specific jobs for people with science or research skills. One post does mention coding, but it’s a call for the creators to fix a bug on the site. The platform does not specialize in science or research-based tasks — for the time being, at least.
