AI Agents Are Terrible Freelance Workers

Wired's publication of an article stating that AI agents are terrible freelance workers, as evidenced by a new benchmark measuring their ability to automate economically valuable chores, highlights the current limitations of human-level AI. This means that website owners should not expect AI agents to fully automate complex tasks on their sites, such as content creation or customer service, at least not yet. The fact that AI agents struggle with economically valuable chores suggests that they may also struggle with tasks that require a deep understanding of context, nuance, and human judgment, which are common on many websites. For website owners looking to track and manage AI bot traffic, this news suggests that it's essential to focus on monitoring simple, repetitive tasks that AI agents can handle, such as data scraping or form filling. To do this effectively, website owners can take the following actionable steps: review their llms.txt files to ensure they are accurately tracking AI bot traffic, implement AI-detection tools to identify and filter out unwanted bot activity, and regularly update their content policies to reflect the evolving capabilities and limitations of AI agents.