When ChatGPT debuted in late 2022, it didn’t just disrupt tech classrooms and corporate boardrooms. According to a New York Times report, it also devastated a surprising global industry: a Kenyan business ecosystem that had grown up around writing college essays for Western students trying to cheat.
The Times described how third-party essay writing became a booming trade in Kenya, at one point employing an estimated 40,000 people in Nairobi alone. For many Kenyans, the work offered wages that dwarfed what they could earn in more traditional fields — even with a college degree.
Teresios Bundi, a Kenyan who built a successful essay-writing operation, told the Times that his first assignment paid just $7 for three hours of work on a topic he’d never heard of. But that modest start grew into something far more substantial. He eventually rented a house, filled it with desks, high-speed internet, and mattresses for the students he hired — some of whom wrote papers between their own classes.
“That was a lifeline for me. I needed the money,” Bundi said of his initial gig.
As demand climbed, so did the pay. Bundi charged between $40 and $70 per paper and sometimes wrote up to three in a single day. By his own account, the work paid at least “five times” what he could have earned in public health — a field he’d studied in college.
The financial rewards translated into visible social status. The Times noted that essay writers in Kenya “drove new Subarus, carried the latest smartphones, and booked exclusive tables at clubs.”
Then everything changed in a matter of months.
AI’s Disruption Hits Fast
ChatGPT offered would-be cheaters a cheaper, faster, and easier method of getting their papers done — no human essay mill required. For men like Bundi, the work dried up quickly.
Bundi, now out of work, offered a warning that stretches far beyond the essay-writing trade.
“A.I. is coming for bankers, for accountants, it’s coming for engineers, and A.I. will come for architects,” he told the outlet. “It’s coming for everybody.”
The fallout has been severe for many former essay writers. Some have returned to rural villages, while others struggle to find any work at all in a difficult formal job market.
“Some have gone back to the villages,” Alex Munyua, a former essay writer, told the Times. “There are those that tried other sectors, but they were frustrated because they couldn’t get formal jobs.”
Online Reaction: Sympathy vs. Schadenfreude
The Times article triggered a wave of online reaction — but not always the kind the newspaper may have expected. Much of the commentary on social media zeroed in on what commentators saw as a bizarre framing: casting the loss of a cheating industry as a human tragedy.
One commenter reacted with blistering sarcasm: “The New York Times should be razed. ‘Here’s an article on how the admirable – checks notes – essay writing cheating business of Africa – has been disrupted by evil AI.’ These a**holes should have been bullied more in high school.”
Another wrote: “We’ve reached the point where ‘AI destroyed jobs that only existed because students were cheating’ is treated as a tragedy.”
The reaction highlights an uncomfortable moral question: Is the collapse of a cheating industry something to mourn, even when it costs thousands of people their livelihoods?
For the workers on the ground, the answer is more complicated. The essay-writing industry provided real income for tens of thousands of Kenyans — many of them students themselves — who were paid to produce papers that American and other Western students submitted as their own.
Some observers noted that the industry’s existence was itself a symptom of dysfunction — both in Western higher education’s reliance on high-stakes written assessments and in Kenya’s own labor market, which pushed college graduates toward work that paid better than their degrees could offer.
A Preview of Broader AI Disruption
Bundi’s warning about the broader reach of AI may be the most portable takeaway from the story. If an industry as human-driven as essay writing can be hollowed out within months of a conversational AI tool going public, then the same forces are likely to reach into other white-collar fields — accountancy, architecture, law, finance — with far larger workforces.
The fate of Kenya’s essay writers may thus serve as a case study in how quickly AI can reshape labor markets, and how little time governments and workers have to adapt.
For now, the workers who were part of the boom are being forced to transition — often with little help. As Munyua put it, some have gone back to the villages. Others are still searching for a foothold in the formal economy, competing for jobs that were already scarce before the AI wave hit.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/thousands-of-africans-doing-homework-for-american-students-lose-jobs-to-ai