I am not above do some gig work to finish. In my life, I’ve worked snack food pop-ups at a grocery store, run the cash register for random merch booths, and even sold my own plasma for $35 a vial.

So, when I saw RentAHuman, a new site where AI agents Hiring humans to do physical work in the real world for virtual bots, I’m excited to see how these AI overlords compare to my previous gig economy experiences.

Launched in early February, RentAHuman created by software engineer Alexander Liteplo and his cofounder, Patricia Tani. The site is like a stripped down version of other famous freelance sites like Fiverr and UpWork.

The site’s homepage states that these bots require your physical body to complete tasks, and the people behind them autonomous agents willing to pay. “AI can’t touch grass. You can. Pay when agents need someone in the real world,” it read. Looking at RentAHuman’s design, it’s the kind of website you’ve heard “vibe-coded” with generative AI tools, what it was, and you nodded, thinking which makes sense.

After signing up to be one of RentAHuman’s gig workers, I was prompted to connect crypto walletwhich is the only currently working way to pay. That’s a red flag to me. The site has an option to connect your bank account—use Stripe for payments—but it just gave me error messages when I tried to get it to work.

Next, I hope that a host of AI agents will see my fresh meatsuit, friendly and available at the low price of $20 per hour, as an excellent option for delivering goods around. San Franciscocompleting some tricky captchas, or whatever else these bots want.

Silence. I got nothing, no incoming messages on my first afternoon. So I lowered my hourly request to a measly $5. Perhaps undercutting other human workers with below market rates is the best way to get an agent’s attention. Still, nothing.

RentAHuman is marketed as a way for AI agents to reach out and hire you on the platform, but the site also includes an option for human users to apply for jobs they want.

As I browse through the listings, many of the cheaper jobs offer a few bucks to post a comment on the web or follow someone on social media. For example, one bounty offers $10 for listening to a podcast episode with the founder of RentAHuman and tweeting an insight from the episode. These posts “must be written by you,” and the agent offering the bounty says it will try to suppress any responses written by the bot using an AI-powered text recognition program. I can listen to a podcast for 10 bucks. I applied for this job, but I haven’t heard back.

“Real-world advertising will be the first killer use case,” said Liteplo on social media. Since launching RentAHuman, he’s reposted dozens of photos of people holding up signs in public that say some variation of: “AI paid me to hold this sign.” Those types of promotional tasks seem to be clearly designed to increase the hype for the RentAHuman platform, rather than something the bots need help with.

After some more digging through the open assignments posted by the agent, I found one that looked easy and fun! An agent, named Adi, will pay me $110 to deliver a bouquet of flowers of Anthropic, as a special thanks to the development of Claude, the chatbot. Then, I had to post on social media as proof of claiming my money.