Abstract:
On September 7, the New York Times reported that thousands of Kenyans had made a living by writing essays for overseas college students. Now, the arrival of AI has almost eliminated this livelihood, which has also sounded the alarm for the online gig economy that many people around the world rely on for survival.
Bundy has been ghostwriting papers for 12 years
The gunman is unemployed for 12 years
The Internet has brought unique opportunities and changed the fate of many people. Teresios Bundi is a typical representative.
Bundy comes from a farming village in Kenya. In 2011, he moved to the capital, Nairobi, and became the first in his family to attend university. There, a friend suggested he try a new online job: writing essays for college students overseas who were cheating.
His first assignment was a two-page paper on the health benefits of garcinia cambogia. It was a fruit he had never heard of before, and he didn't even know anything about the student for whom the paper was being written. It took him 3 hours to complete the job and earned $7.
"That was a life-saving straw for me. I needed the money at that time." Bundy, 34, said in an interview in Nairobi. "I couldn't sleep at all that night. I was ready to work hard all night."
Over the next 12 years, Bundy estimates, he wrote more than 2,500 papers, sometimes as many as three a day. While completing his own degree in public health, he helped engineering, medical, and computer science students complete their studies in faraway countries. Some students even gave him their school login information so he could follow up on their assignments.
He didn’t know it at the time, but he was in the boom period of the Internet gig economy. As internet connectivity spreads across the globe, well-educated young people in countries such as Kenya, the Philippines and India are hungry for work, finding ways to make a living in the cracks of the digital economy. They can make money online, performing jobs that are less glamorous and that people in higher economic classes are unwilling to do.
However, AI is coming and the good days are over.
In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. College students around the world did a simple math, and the answer to that arithmetic problem is now clearer: Why pay a Kenyan freelancer when ChatGPT can do the job?
ChatGPT
Then, the number of essay writing jobs began to decrease. Remuneration is down and order volumes are shrinking. It didn’t take long for the industry to shrink to almost nothing.
“I never thought AI could do this,” Bondi said.
His experience is not unique. Those who have found a foothold in the global online gig economy are facing the same fate. The Kenyan also does meeting transcription work through freelance platforms Upwork and Fiverr, and has also flagged posts on Facebook to help the platform decide what content can be retained. However, these opportunities disappeared one after another.
AI impacts low-level employment
Around the world, technology experts, economists and policymakers are discussing the future of AI. Kenya’s experience already shows that this technology is dismantling some of the lower rungs of the global labor market.
“It’s not just Kenya, everywhere will experience huge changes,” said Mark Graham, a professor at the University of Oxford who studies the global gig economy. “AI has entered these labor markets and taken away a large number of jobs.”
Bundy said he regrets it. After graduating from college in 2015, he abandoned a career path in public health and started an online essay writing company, charging $40 to $70 per essay. Orders are pouring in via digital platforms, and he divides tasks between himself and the students he hires. He rented a house near a university and filled it with desks, high-speed Internet and a mattress. Students come to work between classes and fall asleep when they are too tired to write.
Bundy said he makes at least five times what he would have earned working in public health. He also sends money to his parents. His parents, coffee farmers, gave him a loan to buy him a laptop that he used during college.
He occasionally thinks about whether it is unethical to help students cheat, but ultimately he believes that it is their own choice after all. He said he saw himself as a mentor and was proud of himself: a young Kenyan who was quietly making his way into Western academia.
The new wealth emerging from the paper "shooters" community is everywhere in Nairobi. Researchers estimate that at the peak of the business in the early 2000s, at least 40,000 people in Nairobi alone made money by doing homework for others. The gunman drives a new Subaru, carries the latest smartphone, and books exclusive rooms at nightclubs.
After the industry collapsed, Bundy closed his essay writing business and struggled to find a new career direction. Today, he works for a German government development agency, helping young Kenyans find opportunities in the digital economy. His experience, he said, is a cautionary tale.
“AI is replacing bankers, it is replacing accountants, it is replacing engineers, and it will also replace architects,” he said, “It will affect everyone.”
Grand plan derailed
For those involved in international cheating chains, there is little sympathy. But these “essay mills” were, in a sense, a Kenyan success story.
Kenyan universities graduate more than 100,000 people every year, and paid jobs are scarce in the country's economy. About 80% of jobs are informal - such as delivery drivers, construction workers, street vendors - and youth unemployment is estimated at over 25%. The lack of economic opportunities in Kenya has sparked protests.
Gig work was once seen as a way out for a generation of young people with degrees but nowhere to put them to use. The Kenyan government thought so too.
Around 2009, after cheap high-speed Internet became popular, the Kenyan government regarded online outsourcing as a way to improve its economic status, including work such as text transcription, data entry, graphic design, website development, and basic software programming. Essay ghostwriting, although never officially sanctioned, fits this pattern.
In 2016, the Kenyan government launched a program to train university graduates in how to use online freelancing platforms such as Upwork. In 2022, the year ChatGPT was launched, Kenya launched a 10-year National Digital Master Plan, further emphasizing outsourcing and the online gig economy.
“We just want a job,” said 46-year-old Frida Mwangi. In 2015, while raising her four children, she turned to transcription work in the hope of getting back into the job market.
Mwangi
Mwangi said gig work allowed her to prove to her daughter that women could be mothers and make a living from their own work. She once received a large commission to transcribe audiotaped interviews of immigrants at Ellis Island. She also does medical transcription.
In 2017, as text transcription software became one of the earliest applications of AI, this type of work began to gradually decrease. Mwangi's income dropped, and her employer also told her to use AI and combine it with her own professional knowledge to supplement it. She found that the process was more time-consuming than transcribing the text herself because the AI would mess up the medical terminology. Still, these jobs gradually disappeared.
“My job is completely gone,” Mwangi said. She now fights for better pay and working conditions for gig workers.
Kenya’s push for outsourcing has brought jobs and triggered a backlash. Companies that provide services to U.S. tech giants have been criticized for low wages and poor working conditions.
This has caused related companies to begin to shrink their business. Sama had hired Kenyans to moderate Meta user-generated content but later cut back on operations in Kenya. Scale AI, a startup that hires people to train AI models, has also halted some operations in Kenya.
AI capabilities are still improving. Scale AI and the AI Security Center conducted a test to try to quantify the ability of AI to engage in online freelance work such as product design and data analysis. Last October, leading AI models could only complete 2.5% of these tasks. By July this year, this proportion had risen to 16%.
Difficult transformation
Many people who grew up working essay writing and other gig jobs are now struggling to find their way back into the workforce.
30-year-old Alex Munyua is an industrial chemist who got into this business because it made more money to ghostwrite papers. After the industry declined, he briefly worked in data annotation and social media content moderation. Now, those jobs are gone too.
“Some people have returned to the countryside,” he said. “Others have tried other industries, but they are very frustrated because they cannot find formal jobs.”
Kenya’s economic downturn
Kenya is reeling from economic turmoil. Of its more than 54 million people, 40% live in poverty. Despite the rise of some startups, tech jobs remain scarce.
38-year-old Richard Eshilache once built a lucrative career as a ghostwriter. He revealed that in 2022, he hired more than 100 paper gunners. He has provided ghostwriting services for some overseas students for a long time, and one of them even sent him his diploma.
"He said it belonged to both of us," Esilach said.
Now, he is trying to embrace AI and engage in work such as photo editing and data annotation. But none of these jobs are as lucrative as essay writing.
John Tanui, principal secretary of Kenya’s Ministry of Information, Communications and Digital Economy, remains optimistic about Kenya’s economic potential as an outsourcing hub, saying it will “unleash more opportunities for young people.”
Today, the only remaining jobs in the essay writing industry are primarily for polishers. They were responsible for modifying the AI-generated papers to evade the cheat-detection software used by many universities.
Alphline has been engaged in essay writing since 2021. He only disclosed his first name because he was worried about affecting future employment prospects. Business is as good as ever, she said. With AI, she can do more work: first use the technology to quickly write a first draft, and then rewrite it from beginning to end herself. She eschews tools designed to disguise AI-generated text as human writing, preferring to polish it herself.
“I can clearly tell whether a paper was generated by AI or written by a human,” she said, “but for students who don’t have experience with human writing, they might be caught out.”
For Bundy, the transition was not easy. He said he misses the intellectual game of delving into new subjects and writing under tight deadlines, as well as being with some students from freshman year to graduate school.
"It's like getting a parallel education," he said.
Bundy sometimes wonders what his life would have been like if he had stayed in the public health field.
“Those of my peers who started working after graduating in 2015 have now been promoted step by step,” he said. “If I go back now, I will have to start from the grassroots level and work for someone who just graduated last year.”
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