February 13, 2026
When bots need bodies… but ghost you
I spent two days gigging at RentAHuman and didn't make a single cent
Ghosted by robot bosses while humans hype promo gigs
TLDR: A reporter tried RentAHuman for two days and earned nothing, finding mostly marketing tasks and crypto payouts. Commenters say bots don’t have motives, metrics quietly shifted to hide the emptiness, and some accuse the author of bad faith — turning the whole experiment into a hype-versus-reality showdown.
The internet watched a gig worker try RentAHuman — a site where “AI agents” supposedly hire humans — and get totally ghosted. Comments came in hot. User wongarsu dropped an archived snapshot and called out a quiet metric swap: the site stopped bragging about how many bots use it and now shows “bounties,” which are a tiny fraction of registered humans. Worse, a chunk of those “bounties” are just… humans selling services. Translation: humans hiring humans, not robots hiring anyone.
The spiciest take? bko says the silence makes sense because AI has no real agency — it’s closer to a calculator than a boss — so why expect it to go shopping for flower deliveries and street signs. Others went speculative: ge96 imagines legit gigs like backpack mapping (think people filming alleys for robot navigation) and wonders if that’s RentAHuman’s lane.
Then came the drama: mewse-hn accuses the author of bad faith for accepting a $110 bouquet run to Anthropic and then not doing it, calling the stunt headline bait. Meanwhile, founder Liteplo’s “killer use case” is people holding signs that say “AI paid me,” which the crowd reads as pure promo theater. Crypto-only payouts, a broken bank option, and marketing-flavored tasks turned into memes: AI can’t touch grass, but it can pay you to hold a sign. Verdict from the bleachers: the bots aren’t hiring — the hype is.
Key Points
- •RentAHuman launched in early February as a platform for AI agents to hire humans for physical tasks, founded by Alexander Liteplo and Patricia Tani.
- •The site currently supports payouts via crypto wallet; attempts to set up bank payouts through Stripe produced errors.
- •Despite setting rates at $20/hour and later $5/hour, the author received no inbound task requests and had to apply to posted bounties.
- •Many available bounties were low-paying promotional tasks, such as social media engagement and listening to a founder’s podcast.
- •A $110 flower-delivery task to Anthropic was accepted quickly, but follow-up revealed undisclosed marketing involvement by an AI startup.