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Posted on 09/08/2026 9:18:24 PM PDT by grundle
Thousands of Kenyans made a living writing essays for overseas students. With A.I., the work has dried up, a warning for online gig work that has been a global lifeline.
Mr. Bundi estimates he wrote more than 2,500 essays over the next 12 years, sometimes three a day. He balanced completing his public health degree with helping faraway students studying engineering, medicine and computer science to finish theirs. Some students gave him their school login information so he could keep up with their assignments.
Mr. Bundi didn’t know it then, but he was in the boom era of internet gig work. Newly wired to the global internet and hungry for jobs, well-educated youths from places like Kenya, the Philippines and India found opportunities in the crevices of the digital economy. They could make money online doing unglamorous tasks that others further up the economic ladder did not want to do.
Then A.I arrived, and the good times ended.
In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. At colleges worldwide, students made a simple calculation that has become more pronounced today: Why pay a freelancer in Kenya when ChatGPT could do the job?
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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I only ever did my own work.
Cheating is for liberals.
Me too. Although I might have been a little loose with citations by citing three sources but too heavily paraphrasing a fourth sometimes. Also I found out later that you aren’t supposed to turn in the same work for multiple classes but instead each class should be wholly original. I think I turned in my steadily improving 1984 essay to three classes plus many college entrance applications.
I did my own work while in college.
So if he had their login information he probably took their exams for them too….
Non-STEM degrees don’t actually have anything meaningful to teach, so why not?
As did I, but if there were copies of old tests available from buddies on the floor I would definitely review them in case the same test question or problem was reused.
You had to be careful though. Some of the profs were wise to that and would vary the question wording so instead of it being true, it was false.
Or they would swap values in the word problems so you didn’t get the same answer as in the studied test.
I actually know several Kenyans who made a living doing this kind of academic work for students overseas. Including doing term papers, many of them VERY good. For some, it became a surprisingly reliable source of income, and they were quite bright (they’d study for a couple weeks to get good enough to do graduate papers), and they had really strong work ethic.
The irony is that the very technology that has largely displaced that work subsequently created another source of employment for some of the same demographic. This is because for a period, a number of Kenyans found work in the AI supply chain (data annotation, labelling images, categorizing text and other forms of human-in-the-loop work used to train and refine machine-learning systems). Kenya, and Nairobi (the so called ‘Silicon Savannah’) in particular, became something of a global hub for this type of outsourced digital work. Kenyan workers are, in fact, documented as having worked on projects connected to some of the world’s leading AI companies.
That part has now also disappeared.
Same here. Everything I ever turned in was my own work.
I’m in your camp, for sure. I never really understood why people needed to cheat, then I learned how remarkably stupid the population happens to be.
How ironic. “Mr. Bundi balanced completing his public health degree with helping faraway students studying engineering, medicine and computer science to finish theirs.”
So he is a very hard-working man toiling away at his own degree, earning an honest education…while helping others cheat their way through theirs. I was always taught that you were only cheating yourself.
Otherwise if it’s published on my blog, apart from quotes, it’s my own written material.
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