Artificial intelligence is destroying the livelihoods of young Kenyans who made a living writing essays for university students abroad. As AI chatbots have improved, those students can now produce essays on their own without hiring a ghostwriter.
As many as 40,000 people in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, were once estimated to work in the business of ghostwriting essays for overseas university students, The New York Times reported on the 7th. Highly educated workers in Kenya, where English is an official language, earned substantial income by writing assignments for students in Western countries. Since ChatGPT launched in 2022, however, the industry has been all but disappearing.
Theresios Bundi, 34, is among those hit hardest by the shift. He moved to Nairobi in 2011 and began ghostwriting as a side job, then turned to it full time after earning a degree in public health in 2015. Paid $40 to $70 per assignment, he wrote more than 2,500 essays over 12 years and earned at least five times what a typical public health worker made.
He felt guilty about helping students cheat, but he thought of himself as a tutor and kept at the work. After ChatGPT arrived, orders dropped sharply and rates collapsed. "I never imagined AI could do this kind of work," he told the Times.
Those who built the business into larger operations are in the same position. Richard Esilache, 38, who once expanded his business enough to employ 100 ghostwriters, now makes a living editing photographs. He said he is trying work that uses AI but has not come close to the income he earned in the ghostwriting business.
Alex Munyua, 30, moved into data labeling and social media content moderation after the ghostwriting business declined, but those jobs are disappearing too. "Some went back to their hometowns, and the rest tried other fields but are frustrated because they cannot find permanent jobs," he said.
Kenya's structural weaknesses are deepening the blow. The country produces more than 100,000 university graduates a year, but about 80% of all jobs are informal work such as delivery, construction and street vending, and youth unemployment is estimated at more than 25%. That has led the Kenyan government to effectively tolerate online platform work, including essay ghostwriting.
The pace of AI development is now removing even that last safety net. In tests conducted jointly by Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety, the rate at which AI models completed online freelance tasks jumped to 16% in July this year from 2.5% last October.
"AI is already coming for bankers, accountants, engineers and architects," Bundi warned. "The jobs crisis will eventually hit everyone."
