AI Dismantled Kenya's Student Essay-Writing Industry in Two Years

At the start of this decade, an entire informal economy was thriving in Nairobi built around writing academic papers for students in the West. Today, as The New York Times reports, that market has all but disappeared, and the culprit is ChatGPT and other generative AI tools.

How the business worked

The trade, documented by journalists Adam Satariano, Paul Mozur and Edwin Okoth, involved writing essays, papers and coursework assignments for students in Europe and North America who either didn't want to or didn't have time to write them themselves. Kenya had long been a natural hub for such services: strong English skills, high education levels and a low cost of living let local graduates compete on price with writers from other countries.

Back in 2016, Kenya's government even began training university graduates to work on freelance platforms, betting on growth in the digital outsourcing sector. In 2022, just before ChatGPT launched, Kenya adopted a ten-year plan to develop online outsourcing services as one of the pillars of its digital economy.

The turning point

The break came as ChatGPT spread rapidly after its 2022 launch. Instead of paying Kenyan writers, students simply started asking the chatbot to write the paper, for free or for a fraction of the previous price. Demand didn't shift to a cheaper provider, it vanished almost entirely within two years.

Artificial intelligence has come in and taken over huge swaths of these labor markets - Mark Graham, professor at the University of Oxford and researcher of the gig economy

Richard Esilaba, who at his peak employed a hundred writers, shut down his business. Frida Mwangi, who previously worked in transcription and writing, speaks plainly about losing her livelihood and is now involved in campaigns for gig economy workers.

My job disappeared completely - Frida Mwangi, former contract essay writer

What's left of the industry

The work hasn't vanished entirely, but its nature has changed. The assignments that still come in mostly involve editing AI-written text so it slips past plagiarism checkers and machine-generated content detectors, which Western universities are using ever more widely. It's lower-paid, less stable work than writing papers from scratch used to be.

Teresios Bundi, one of the report's subjects, has since found work at a German development organization, but he has no illusions about the scale of what has hit his former industry.

AI is coming for bankers, for accountants, it will come for engineers and for architects. It will come for everyone - Teresios Bundi, former contract essay writer

What it means for labor markets

The story out of Nairobi is one of the first well-documented cases in which an entire branch of the informal service economy was dismantled in a short span by a widely available AI tool, rather than by work migrating to a cheaper country or factory automation. That sets it apart from earlier waves of outsourcing, where work moved but didn't disappear.

Service sectors built on writing, translation or simple text analysis are especially exposed to this kind of shock, since language models keep getting better and cheaper at these tasks. In developing countries, where this sort of remote work was often one of the few paths to a stable income, the effects can be severe and hard to offset with new jobs.

For Polish readers, it's a warning sign for industries built on writing text for hire, from copywriting to basic translation, where the business model relied on doing work cheaper than the client could but still requiring a human. The Kenyan example shows that once AI can do a task for free or nearly free, a human's price advantage stops mattering.