There was a moment, not so long ago, when receiving a handwritten message was normal. Then it became special. Later it became rare. Now it's a gift.
The message didn’t change. What changed was the effort it takes for someone to take the time.
AI did the same with responses, content, and conversations. It made them cheap. Abundant. And at the moment something becomes abundant, its scarcity turns into business.
Fatigue is also a market
When something saturates a market, the antidote market appears. This happened with ultra-processed food and organic food. With social networks and digital detox. With streaming and vinyl. AI is no exception.
The volume of content generated by language models grew so quickly that it produced its own cultural antibody: people willing to pay or click for something that guarantees it was created by a person.
The most illustrative case in recent weeks is youraislopbores.me. A programmer, tired of generic AI content, built a site where you write or draw something and a person responds. Not a model. A random person, with 75 seconds to reply. No profile, no reputation, nothing to gain except the credit to ask their own question afterward.
The site reached several millions of visits in a week. Not because it was technologically impressive. But because it hit a nerve: people missed not knowing for sure if there was someone on the other side.
For once on the internet, no one was selling you anything.
"Made by humans" is already a label
For decades, having a person make a product was the default. No one put "handpicked" on an orange until industrial oranges appeared. Today we are at the same moment with intellectual work.
The abundance of AI-generated content is creating a new label: human verified. And where there’s a label, there’s a price.
RentAHuman takes it literally. It’s a platform where AI agents can hire real people to complete tasks that models still can't handle alone: making ambiguous decisions, navigating situations that require judgment, filling in the gaps that automation doesn’t cover.
This isn’t the company hiring humans instead of AI. It's AI hiring humans as a resource. The human is neither the replacement nor the protagonist. They are the subcontractor. What was once the standard is now the upgrade, and the upgrade has a market price.
The antidote has the same shape as the poison
Here lies the irony worth mentioning: products being sold as alternatives to AI are using exactly the same business logic they criticize.
youraislopbores.me has an "extended thinking" mode where they give more time to the human on the other side to respond, just like OpenAI’s reasoning models. RentAHuman has pricing per task, just like an API. They scale, optimize, measure engagement.
The antidote has the same shape as the poison.
This is not a criticism. It’s an observation about how the market works: when something becomes a desire, someone packages it. Vinyl returned not because it sounds better technically but because imperfection turned into value. AI is accelerating that cycle, compressing in months what other technologies took decades.
The question that remains
At what point does "ensuring that I am human" become the most expensive service on the internet?
Comments