AI killed a booming essay-writing industry in Kenya. Now thousands of gig workers are looking for what comes next

For more than a decade, thousands of young Kenyans made a surprisingly good living writing college essays for students thousands of kilometres away. Some earned far more than they could in conventional graduate jobs. Then artificial intelligence arrived.

The once-thriving essay-writing industry has now shrunk dramatically as students who previously paid freelancers to complete assignments increasingly turn to AI tools such as ChatGPT instead. The collapse is leaving former writers scrambling for new work and raising a larger question about what happens to online gig workers as AI becomes capable of doing more of their jobs, according to a report in the New York Times.

An online industry that supported thousands

Essay writing took off in Kenya as cheap, high-speed internet spread across the country. Young university graduates and students could earn dollars and pounds by completing assignments for students in the US, Britain and elsewhere.

At its peak early this decade, researchers estimated that at least 40,000 people in Nairobi were being paid to do other students’ homework. The money could be substantial enough to provide a lifestyle that many conventional graduate jobs could not match.

Teresios Bundi was one of them. He began writing essays after moving from a farming village to Nairobi for university in 2011. His first job paid just $7 for three hours of work, but he eventually turned essay writing into a business.

Over 12 years, Bundi estimates that he wrote more than 2,500 essays. After graduating with a public health degree, he chose essay writing over a career in his field because he could earn considerably more.

Then students discovered ChatGPT

The business began changing rapidly after ChatGPT was released in 2022.

Students who once needed to hire someone in Kenya to research and write an assignment could suddenly generate an essay themselves within minutes. Work began disappearing and rates fell. For people such as Bundi, an industry that had supported them for years almost vanished.

Essay writers were not the only ones affected.

Kenyans had also built careers transcribing recordings, moderating social-media content and carrying out other repetitive digital tasks for overseas companies. AI and automation have gradually eaten into many of these jobs too.

Transcription worker Frida Mwangi saw her work begin drying up even before the arrival of ChatGPT as automated transcription improved. Employers increasingly asked workers to use AI and then correct its output. Eventually, much of the work disappeared altogether.

The new job: making AI sound human

There is an irony in what remains of Kenya’s essay-writing industry.

Some writers are now being paid to edit essays that students have already generated using AI. Their job is to rewrite the text so that it sounds more human and is less likely to be flagged by AI-detection systems.

Others have moved into data annotation, AI training and other forms of digital work, although former essay writers say these jobs often pay considerably less.

A warning for the wider gig economy

Kenya’s experience matters beyond one ethically questionable industry.

The country had actively promoted online outsourcing as a way of creating opportunities for its large population of educated young people. More than 100,000 students graduate from Kenyan universities each year, while salaried jobs remain scarce.

Now AI is beginning to compete for precisely the kind of digital work that once provided an alternative.

The technology is also getting better quickly. A test of AI’s ability to perform online freelance work such as product design and data analysis found that leading models completed 2.5 percent of the tasks last October. By July, that had risen to 16 percent.

For Kenya’s former essay writers, that future has already arrived. Their story may be unusual, but the larger lesson is not: a digital job that looks secure today can disappear surprisingly quickly when AI learns how to do it.