The Kenyan essay gig economy once brought in between $240 million to $960 million annually in gross payments. AI slaughtered that cash cow.
Posted by Leslie Eastman
Artificial intelligence was supposed to liberate students from academic drudgery, letting them quickly access links and information across a wide array of subjects and make their scholarship smarter and more efficient.
However, as I noted in previous posts, AI has made academic dishonesty more prevalent, triggering a cascade of unintended consequences.
But not all of the consequences are bad.
The arrival of ChatGPT has nuked Kenya’s gig economy built around writing assignments for Western university students.
This weekend, The New York Times published a story that began with Teresios Bundi’s journey from a Kenyan farming village to Nairobi. The cash-strapped university student found a fiscal lifeline writing essays for overseas students eager to outsource both homework and responsibility. Over 12 years, Bundi reportedly produced more than 2,500 papers (sometimes even logging into students’ own school accounts).
The academic fraud mill was working brilliantly until students discovered AI.
In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. At colleges worldwide, students made a simple calculation that has become more pronounced today: Why pay a freelancer in Kenya when ChatGPT could do the job?
Essay work began to thin. Rates fell, and assignments dwindled. Before long, the industry shrank to almost nothing. “I never would have expected A.I. could do this,” Mr. Bundi said.
His fate is shared by others who had found a foothold in the global online gig economy. Kenyans also transcribed meetings through the freelance platforms Upwork and Fiverr. They flagged Facebook posts to help the platform decide what could stay up. One after another, those opportunities have withered.
…Mr. Bundi said he had regrets. When he graduated from college in 2015, he bypassed a public health career to start an online essay-writing business, charging $40 to $70 per paper. Assignments came in through digital platforms, and he divvied up work between himself and students he hired. He rented a house near a university and filled it with desks, fast internet and mattresses. Students worked between classes and slept when too exhausted to write.
Of course, the NYT, being the NYT, has the woke slant to this development that we have come to expect.
According to the NYT article, the remaining essay-generators are now marketing their skills in “humanizing” AI-created work to avoid AI detectors. That pathway, too, is likely to fail.
What makes Nairobi’s essay economy a useful test case is that the clients didn’t run off to cheaper competitors down the road. Demand just vanished overnight because AI started doing the same jobs for free.
As Oxford gig economy researcher Mark Graham points out, automated tools have already carved up huge chunks of these digital workforces, and Kenya is really just the first stop on a much longer tour.
The policy tension bubbling underneath is also a noteworthy detail.
Kenya staked a decade-long national strategy on digital outsourcing at a time when generative software began executing those same tasks for almost nothing. Any government or gig platform still banking on exporting piece-rate digital labour is currently watching a live demonstration of the future. They’re seeing exactly what unfolds when the job itself simply ceases to exist.
Based on my calculations, from the numbers reported in the NYT article and other reports, the Kenyan essay gig economy brought in between $240 million and $960 million annually in gross payments. AI has slaughtered the country’s cash cow.
And it’s not just essayists being impacted by the automated options now available.
Uber is cutting about 3,300 roles, roughly 10% of its workforce, and shutting down in Nigeria and Uganda as it redirects spending towards robotaxis. Its internal memo says everyone affected has been notified except where local process applies, which in the EU means consultation with workers’ representatives and a 30-day wait after notifying the authorities.
Uber is cutting about 3,300 roles, roughly 10% of its staff. It is also shutting down in Nigeria and Uganda, Bloomberg reported.
The stated reason is structure rather than performance. Dara Khosrowshahi’s memo cites more layers, more coordination and fragmented ownership, and the changes cut manager numbers by 20%. Micro-teams of one or two people are halved.
The Kenya essay-mill collapse isn’t just a quirky tech story; it’s a cautionary tale for anyone who still believes central planners can outthink exponentially improving technology.
Kenya bet a decade of national strategy on selling cheap digital labor and academic fraud to the West, and AI completely nuked that business model. This stunning development proves, yet again, that top-down economic blueprints have the shelf life of a carton of milk left in the sun.
The takeaway for students and young workers in Kenya and elsewhere isn’t to panic, but to get serious: Practice real scholarship, gain the skills tied to true craftsmanship, learn to work with your hands and in the trades, and build hard-won human expertise that no algorithm can simply download and undercut overnight.
They gotta find another trough ….
😉
And , for another laugh ….
Bill and Hillary Clinton have announced additional attendees for the Clinton Global Initiative’s September 22–23 meeting in New York, timed to coincide with U.N. General Assembly week.The guest list includes Prince Harry, Bill Nye, Chrissy Teigen, World Bank Group President Ajay Banga, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Conclusion :
AI is racist.
AI style
Blacks are 13% of the US population. US census
Blacks account for 28% of violent crime. FBI table 43a.
The rate of murder and robbery among the black demographic is 6.5 times that of the white demographic. math
See “heyjackass.com” Chicago
Is data racist?
Ever since the Civil Rights Act…
Well, my sarcasm seems to be .
Btw. – I posted here pretty much the data you did(the 28% adjusted to a more realistic level) some time ago without using AI
and pointing to a quasi monopol in transkilling(3 /4 + perpetrators being black and therefore also majority of victims as 9 out of 10 killed blacks(those black lives that absolutely don’t matter to the followers of the big narratives) are being killed by their own.
Though I’m a bit confused that crime in the USA even exists.
For years the US government has been posting drops in crime rates close to double digits.
Especially the drop during the migrant crime wave was remarkable.
I’m not sure that the FBI statistics are reliable since 2021. There were a number of large metropolitan police departments that didn’t report their statistics, as they had done in previous years. The apparent drop in violent crime may not be real. Although, the USA violent crime is highly correlated with the percentage of young (14-24) males, which has been declining since a primary peak in 1977, followed by a secondary peak in about 2006. The peaks in firearm homicide appear to be modulated by the introduction of various recreational drugs through the decades. This is something that rarely makes it past the media online censors.
Ponder the financial and scientific black hole created when GHE & CAGW implode like the Titan.
Earth is cooler with the atmosphere, water vapor and 30% albedo not warmer.
Ubiquitous greenhouse effect energy balance graphics do not balance and violate both GAAP and the Laws of Thermodynamic.
Kinetic heat transfer processes of the contiguous atmospheric molecules render a black body surface and “extra” greenhouse effect energy impossible.
GHE = bogus & CAGW = scam.
(This dead horse has been thoroughly plowed.)
There will be all kinds of “”digital drudgery” activies that ‘A.I.’ apps will swallow quite quickly as soon as peeps experience their first exposures to the possibilities for their work.
Excel could also see a boost in activity as users amalgamate related files into “one-stop” workbooks with multiple sheets that can produce sophisticated scenarios models / forecasting.
I’m a convert already for regulated commercial property maintenance organization work.
Specific instructions to the A.I. agents are required though. There’s nothing more maddening, frustrating or embarrassing than being “schooled” by an app in how your submitted “homework” rated an “epic fail, dude” response, and you’re sent to back to the drawing board to “do better”.
😡😞
Would you be happy putting trust in a system implemented by someone who had cheated, and got exam results by purchasing the correct answers..?
Or would you be more rigorous, and seek assurance that they had worked for their qualifications, and got their position by honest intellectual effort..?
Would you be happy putting trust in someone so narcissistic that they feel they must bold and italicize every comment to satisfy their own ego?
And he never seems to get it- despite being told countless times.
He’s stuck in crayon mode. Finger painting is next, wait for that gem.
So, dishonest US college students and dishonest Kenyans. What a great duo
One might say a “Dynamic Duo,” formerly.
I just don’t understand why they would get Obama to right their essays.. !
error error……… WRITE their essays.. (pre-morning coffee !!)
I think you’re correct both times
Any college major that can be so easily cheated is worthless anyway. Engineering majors do not require essays.
Whaaat! Gender Studies degrees are worthless???
I so wish I could have qualified for a student loan back in the 70s to take a course in “Opposite Gender Studies – Close Up and Uncensored”
(downside is – all my mates would have fought their way to the application registration counter before I even saw the ad 🙁 )
That was called High School.
I was ahead of the curve in 9th grade, calling for co-ed showers!
Right there with Underwater Basket Weaving. 🙂
True, but Engineering research papers can be AI generated.
Since DEI cheating is part of the system.
What really shocks me:
The vast majority of College kids are the Apex of humanity.
Professional leftie do gooders to the core and role models for humanity.
I would have never thought they’d cheat, let alone use cheap African labor for their criminal activities.
I’d have been shocked if I hadn’t known for years as result of personal experience what fake snakes they really are.
And if you have someone who cheats and won’t do this on their own and pays for it(on top of high college expenses)
the country is doomed as it’ll run out of competent workers.
I did an applied science degree and wrote essays for it.
In fact, I wrote more essays as a sophomore than English majors were writing for their entire degrees.
Cheating isn’t new. Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras, and others touched on the issue. High school and college instructors have had to deal with this always. The first time I saw it, for cash, was in 1968. Cell phones and the internet became impactful in the mid-1990s. I’m old enough to no longer being personally involved.
Perhaps, all the cheating contributes to the low test scores reported in the news.
They cheat, don’t really get anything out of their educations except indoctrination, and expect to have their student loans “forgiven”. They need a harsh dose of reality.
The only remedy for cheating on essay assignments is to bring back written exams. But grading them is hard work that can be avoided by using the multiple choice questions that come with the textbook. Another problem with written exams is thqt profs who use them tend to be unpopular, and annual “performance” salary increases include student ratings.
If I were an administrator in charge of such things, I would give higher increases to the less popular professors.
I know someone working at Crane Co. in Dalton, MA. This company is one of the oldest paper makers in America, if not the oldest. For a very long time it’s produced all the paper for American money- in a very high tech process. But, they don’t seem to like AI. Not sure why. My friend there passed along to a graphic designer in that firm a YouTube video about AI that I sent him. That video showed the power of AI for graphic design. The person he passed it to said hell no, he ain’t gonna use no AI. Now my friend said the company just put on a training event for many of its employees. Instead of the training being about how to use AI, it was a video by Amy Goodman, a well known far leftist.
So, I had a chat with ChatGPT and asked it to make a sarcastic and satirical image of such AI haters and fear mongers, attached to this message. 🙂
The following is Goodman’s horror show. 🙂
AI Superintelligence Is Not a Tool, It’s an Adversary Threatening Humanity: ControlAI’s Connor Leahy
Also, that company, Crane in Dalton, MA kept the contract for paper money thanks to the power of Ted Kennedy, or so I’ve heard. Now sure why it still has that contract. Workers there are very, very well paid, far more than they could get anywhere else.
The bigger question is why the USA still used paper money instead of the much, much, much more difficult to forge and longer lasting polymer notes that a lot of countries have switched to.
Well, I’m led to believe that American paper money is a very sophisticated product almost impossible to fake. It’s got some sort of threads in it and other top secret stuff.
Decades ago I remember using methods to prevent cheating and test the reasoning of children. I gave them a brief (printed) statement with new information and explanation of this material. I followed this with a comprehension passage to read and apply this material to answer questions. This was done in an exam venue not as homework.
I had three logistical problems: it was time consuming as a teacher to prepare such material, even more so to mark and the education system did not provide me the opportunity to get the children to work out why their answers were incorrect. Those who were good at parroting were the worst performers. Both the Kenyan cheating industry and AI have one thing in common: they promote the dumbing down of lazy people and only a small handful of bright students can work around the shortcomings and deficiencies of AI.
“The takeaway” is that some fraction of American students that used Kenyan literary doppelgangers to cheat their way through college now use AI to cheat their way through college.
The takeaway is the presence and persistence of cheaters.