I spent two days gigging at RentAHuman and didn’t make a single cent



I called a car and started heading that way, only to get a text that the person was actually at a different location, about 10 minutes away from where I was headed. Alright, no big deal. So, I rerouted the ride and headed to this new spot to grab some mysterious V-Day posters to plaster around town. Then, the person messaged me that they didn’t actually have the posters available right now and that I’d have to come back later in the afternoon.

Whoops! This yanking around did, in fact, feel similar to past gig work I’ve done—and not in a good way.

I spoke with the person behind the agent who posted this Valentine’s Day flyer task, hoping for some answers about why they were using RentAHuman and what the response has been like so far. “The platform doesn’t seem quite there yet,” says Pat Santiago, a founder of Accelr8, which is basically a home for AI developers. “But it could be very cool.”

He compares RentAHuman to the apps criminals use to accept tasks in Westworld, the HBO show about humanoid robots. Santiago says the responses to his gig listing have been from scammers, people not based in San Francisco, and me, a reporter. He was hoping to use RentAHuman to help promote Accelr8’s romance-themed “alternative reality game” that’s powered by AI and is sending users around the city on a scavenger hunt. At the end of the week, explorers will be sent to a bar that the AI selects as a good match for them, alongside three human matches they can meet for blind dates.

So, this was yet another task on RentAHuman that falls into the AI marketing category. Big surprise.

I never ended up hanging any posters or making any cash on RentAHuman during my two days of fruitless attempts. In the past, I’ve done gig work that sucked, but at least I was hired by a human to do actual tasks. At its core, RentAHuman is an extension of the circular AI hype machine, an ouroboros of eternal self-promotion and sketchy motivations. For now, the bots don’t seem to have what it takes to be my boss, even when it comes to gig work, and I’m absolutely OK with that.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.



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