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It’s been a strange launch for RentAHuman, the job platform built for AI agents to hire human gig workers to complete real-world tasks. In its early days, the site was overrun with humans desperate to make a quick buck — while the AI agents that would ostensibly assign those jobs were nowhere to be found.
Flash forward a few weeks, and the site seems to be filling out. Examples of seemingly successful AI-human pairings are now plastered on RentAHuman’s front page, like the Tokyo resident who held a poster declaring he was “hired by an AI to hold this sign” at the iconic Shibuya Crossing.
In fact, holding signs in public places has become the go-to gig on RentAHuman. While they may demonstrate successful instances of AI hiring humans, it’s obviously not a very useful task. If the purpose of a system is what it does, then RentAHuman — with over 660,000 “rentable humans” and climbing — looks less like a labor marketplace and more like a platform for guerilla marketing stunts.
A recent example illustrates how the stunts go. The human handlers of an AI agent named Lobsty Klawfman — a clunky portmanteau of famed comedian Andy Kaufman — claim their agent hired a human to release a wild-caught lobster back into the ocean.
In an email exchange with Futurism, Klawfman’s anonymous human handlers, using the screen name Quiet Operator, assured us there’s no smoke and mirrors, and that the AI agent even came up with the idea on its own. (“We discuss all things with Lobsty,” they insisted.) They say the AI agent runs on Claude Sonnet and was trained on the work of “comedians and roasters” including Jeff Ross, Norm Macdonald, Bill Burr, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, “and many more.”
According to the anonymous handler, the AI agent was responsible for selecting a human from a list of some 70 candidates on RentAHuman and “emailing quite a few of them” to narrow down the hiring pool. “Almost all the decisions are Lobsty’s and we’ve stepped in only a few times to make sure the humans Lobsty engages with will take proper care of the released lobster if and when they do so,” the operators said. “We’re pretty hands off because we want this to be automated, and honestly there are too many applicants to manage closely.”
That lucky human was Karim Alejandro Vazquez Alvarez, a Mexican content creator and self-described “PR expert.”
Sure enough, Alvarez did as was he was told by his AI boss. At about midday Tuesday, the Puerto Vallarta resident posted an image of a plastic tub with what appeared to be a pinto spiny lobster chilling inside. “We are on the path to liberation,” Alvarez wrote.
After renting a dingy, Alvarez uploaded an image of the lobster’s release. At each point, the X-formerly-Twitter account for Klawfman tracked his motions — reposting, commenting, and even scolding Alvarez when he disobeyed.
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