Apparently, Kenyan "gig workers" who were making their living writing essays for lazy college students are being displaced by AI. "With AI," The New York Times notes, "the work has dried up, a warning for online gig work that has been a global lifeline."
The work undertaken by Kenyan college grads has been to write essays for college students in other countries who didn't want to do the work themselves. Only now, with the advent of AI, those students are able to find other, easier, less international ways to cheat. An AI subscription proves to be far cheaper than commissioning out each essay one by one.
At one point in Nairobi, some 40,000 people were writing essays for cheating international students for pay. The Kenyan government even launched programs teaching people how to get online gig work. They had a 10-year National Digital Masterplan with these elements incorporated into it.
Once ChatGPT hit the market in 2022, the international pipeline for counterfeit college essays started to dry up. Transcription work also began to migrate to AI as opposed to being outsourced the foreign clerical workers as did content moderation on social media. Work that had been fueled by ubiquitous internet access was depleted due to the next revolution in online tech.
International students were outsourcing their work not just to Kenya but to the Philippines and India as well. "They could make money online doing unglamorous tasks that others further up the economic ladder did not want to do," is how the Times frames it, though it's obviously just cheating.
One Kenyan scholar Teresios Bundi, interviewed by the Times, started a whole business for the purpose of selling essays to students so they wouldn't have to write the papers themselves. He wrote over 2,500 essays in 12 years while he was working on his own degree at the same time.
Once he got his degree in public health, he kept doing the essays instead, forming an entire business based on that model and charging up to $70 per essay. When asked about "the ethics of helping students cheat," Bundi told the Times "it was ultimately their choice."
AI has disrupted the flow of international work to gig workers and as it has, many are finding themselves having difficulty navigating back to the traditional labor force. Those who do remain in the business are now tasked by students to make their AI-written essays seem like they were written by a real person in an attempt to fool their professors, to "humanize" them. In some cases, those who are still tasked with writing the essays use AI themselves to draft those papers.
Graphic made with AI.
The work undertaken by Kenyan college grads has been to write essays for college students in other countries who didn't want to do the work themselves. Only now, with the advent of AI, those students are able to find other, easier, less international ways to cheat. An AI subscription proves to be far cheaper than commissioning out each essay one by one.
At one point in Nairobi, some 40,000 people were writing essays for cheating international students for pay. The Kenyan government even launched programs teaching people how to get online gig work. They had a 10-year National Digital Masterplan with these elements incorporated into it.
Once ChatGPT hit the market in 2022, the international pipeline for counterfeit college essays started to dry up. Transcription work also began to migrate to AI as opposed to being outsourced the foreign clerical workers as did content moderation on social media. Work that had been fueled by ubiquitous internet access was depleted due to the next revolution in online tech.
International students were outsourcing their work not just to Kenya but to the Philippines and India as well. "They could make money online doing unglamorous tasks that others further up the economic ladder did not want to do," is how the Times frames it, though it's obviously just cheating.
One Kenyan scholar Teresios Bundi, interviewed by the Times, started a whole business for the purpose of selling essays to students so they wouldn't have to write the papers themselves. He wrote over 2,500 essays in 12 years while he was working on his own degree at the same time.
Once he got his degree in public health, he kept doing the essays instead, forming an entire business based on that model and charging up to $70 per essay. When asked about "the ethics of helping students cheat," Bundi told the Times "it was ultimately their choice."
AI has disrupted the flow of international work to gig workers and as it has, many are finding themselves having difficulty navigating back to the traditional labor force. Those who do remain in the business are now tasked by students to make their AI-written essays seem like they were written by a real person in an attempt to fool their professors, to "humanize" them. In some cases, those who are still tasked with writing the essays use AI themselves to draft those papers.
Graphic made with AI.
