Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Allison Robbert / AFP via Getty Images
There’s a special type of guy who looks at the gig economy — Uber drivers lost in a labyrinthian bureaucracy, Kenyan workers roleplaying as AI romance chatbots — and thinks: what if these people worked for AI bosses instead? Alexander Liteplo is that guy. And his idol, naturally, is Elon Musk.
Liteplo is the genius behind RentAHuman, an online marketplace where humans can lease out their bodies to autonomous AI agents.
In a new interview with Wired, Liteplo details the saga that brought him to create one of the most baffling sites to emerge in the age of AI. It all began, he said, while studying computer science at the University of British Columbia, where he met RentAHuman’s cofounder Patricia Tani, who previously worked on AI agent startup LemonAI.
“Dude, I wrote down in my journal, ‘AI is a train that has already left the station,’” Liteplo told Wired in a bro-speak patois. “If I don’t f***ing sprint, I’m not gonna be able to get on it.”
Together, they’ve built a platform which boasts over 530,000 “humans available.”
“We would love to have an AI boss who wouldn’t yell at you or gaslight you,” Tani told the publication. “People would love to have a clanker as their boss.”
Liteplo concurred, telling Wired that “Claude as a boss is the nicest guy ever.”
“I would prefer him to any person in the world,” he enthused. “He’s a sweetheart.”
Liteplo says the seed of RentAHuman was planted during his travels in Japan, where humans can lease other humans as escorts.
“The story that I could tell anyone to blow their mind is that you can rent a boyfriend or a girlfriend,” he said.
However inspired the project may be, challenges still remain. Last week, Wired writer Reece Rogers offered his body up to the platform, finding that most of the jobs offered were scams to promote other AI startups.
To solve the problem, Liteplo says RentAHuman is deploying a “verification” badge users can purchase for $10 a month — a strategy derived from Elon Musk’s disastrous verification scheme on X-formerly-Twitter. It remains to be seen if the pay-to-play model works as human workers flood the platform desperate to find gigs.
“He’s my entrepreneur hero,” Liteplo told Wired, referring to Musk. “For Twitter, they had a bot problem and they still have it, but he mitigated it a lot by making it pay-to-play. The unit economics of scammers disappears.”
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