Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Allison Robert/AFP via Getty Images
There’s a special kind of person who looks at the gig economy — Uber drivers lost in a labyrinthine bureaucracy, Kenyan workers role-playing as AI romance chatbots — and thinks: What if these people worked for AI bosses instead? Alexander Lightplow is that guy. And his idol is, naturally, Elon Musk.
Lightplow is the genius behind RentHuman, an online marketplace where humans can lease their bodies to autonomous AI agents.
in a new interview with wiredLightplot details the saga that inspired him to create one of the most astonishing sites to emerge in the age of AI. It all started, he said, while studying computer science at the University of British Columbia, where he met RentHuman co-founder Patricia Tani, who previously worked at AI agent startup LemonAI.
“Man, I wrote in my journal, ‘AI is a train that has already left the station,'” Lightplot told wired In bro-speak patois. “If I didn’t want to run fast, I wouldn’t be able to climb it.”
Together, they have created a platform that claims to have over 530,000 “humans available”.
“We would love to have an AI boss who doesn’t yell at you or gas you,” Tani told the publication. “People would love to have a clunker as their boss.”
Lightplow agreed and said wired That “Claude is the best person I’ve ever had as a boss.”
“I’d rather have her than anyone in the world,” he said excitedly. “He’s a darling.”
Lightplow says that the seed for RentHuman was sown during his visit to Japan, where humans can hire other humans as escorts.
“The story I can tell anybody is that it’s going to blow their mind that you can rent a boyfriend or girlfriend,” he said.
No matter how inspired the project is, challenges still remain. last week, wired Author Reece Rogers He presented his body on the platform, and found that most of the jobs offered were scams to promote other AI startups.
To solve the problem, Lightplot says RentAHuman is deploying a “verification” badge that users can purchase for $10 per month — a strategy taken from ex-Elon Musk’s disastrous verification scheme on Twitter. It remains to be seen whether the pay-to-play model works as human workers remain on the platform desperate to find gigs.
“He’s my entrepreneurial hero,” Lightplot tells wiredReferring to Musk. “For Twitter, they had a bot problem and they still have it, but they mitigated a lot of it by making it pay-to-play. The unit economics of scammers disappear.”
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