Teresios Bundi once symbolized the strange, life-changing opportunities the internet provided.
Hailing from a farming village in Kenya, Mr. Bundi moved to the capital, Nairobi, in 2011 to be the first in his family to attend university. There, a friend suggested he try a new online job: writing essays for cheating overseas college students.
His first assignment was a two-page essay on the health benefits of the Garcinia cambogia. It was a fruit he had never heard of, and an essay written for a student he didn’t know anything about. He earned $7 for three hours of work.
“That was a lifeline for me, I needed the money,” Mr. Bundi, now 34, said in an interview in Nairobi. He added: “I could not sleep that night. I was ready to burn the midnight oil.”
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?
Essay work began to thin. Rates fell, and assignments dwindled. Before long, the industry shrank to almost nothing. “I never would have expected A.I. could do this,” Mr. Bundi said.
His fate is shared by others who had found a foothold in the global online gig economy. Kenyans also transcribed meetings through the freelance platforms Upwork and Fiverr. They flagged Facebook posts to help the platform decide what could stay up. One after another, those opportunities have withered.
As technologists, economists and policymakers worldwide debate the future of A.I., Kenya’s experience shows how the technology is already dismantling some lower rungs of the global labor market.
“It’s not just going to be Kenya — it’s going to be everywhere we see a big transformation,” said Mark Graham, an Oxford University professor who has studied the global gig economy. “A.I. has come in and taken big chunks of these labor markets.”
Mr. Bundi said he had regrets. When he graduated from college in 2015, he bypassed a public health career to start an online essay-writing business, charging $40 to $70 per paper. Assignments came in through digital platforms, and he divvied up work between himself and students he hired. He rented a house near a university and filled it with desks, fast internet and mattresses. Students worked between classes and slept when too exhausted to write.
Mr. Bundi said he had made at least five times as much as he could earn in public health. He sent money to his parents, coffee farmers who had taken out a loan to buy him a laptop for college.
He sometimes considered the ethics of helping students cheat, but decided it was ultimately their choice. He said he saw himself as a tutor and was proud that a young Kenyan was thriving unnoticed inside Western academia.
Around Nairobi, new money among essay writers was visible. At its peak early this decade, at least 40,000 people in the city were being paid to do other people’s homework, researchers estimated. Essay writers drove new Subarus, carried the latest smartphones and booked exclusive tables at clubs.
After the crash, Mr. Bundi closed his essay-writing business and struggled to find a career path. He is now working for a German government development organization helping young Kenyans find opportunities in the digital economy. He said his experience was a cautionary tale.
“A.I. is coming for bankers, for accountants, it’s coming for engineers, and A.I. will come for architects,” he said. “It’s coming for everybody.”
A Master Plan Goes Awry
Few have much sympathy for those aiding an international cheating scheme. But the “essay mills” were, in their way, a Kenyan success story.
More than 100,000 students graduate from Kenyan universities each year into an economy where salaried jobs are scarce. Roughly 80 percent of work is informal — delivery driving, construction, street vending — and youth unemployment is estimated to be over 25 percent. Lack of economic opportunity has fueled a Gen Z-led protest movement.
For a generation with degrees and nowhere to use them, gig work looked like the way out. Kenya’s government thought so, too.
After cheap high-speed internet began arriving around 2009, the government saw online outsourcing — transcription, data entry, graphic design, website development and basic software coding — as a way to climb the economic ladder. Essay writing, while never officially condoned, fit the model.
In 2016, the Kenyan government started a program training university graduates to navigate online freelancer platforms like Upwork. In 2022, the year ChatGPT appeared, Kenya adopted a 10-year National Digital Masterplan that further emphasized outsourcing and online gig work.
“We just wanted jobs,” said Frida Mwangi, 46, who in 2015 turned to transcription work as a path back to the work force while raising four children.
Gig work meant that she could show her daughter that a woman can be a mother and earn a living, Ms. Mwangi said. One big assignment was transcribing interviews of Ellis Island immigrants; she also did medical transcriptions.
That work began drying up in 2017 when transcription software became one of the earliest applications of A.I. Ms. Mwangi’s wages fell, and employers told her to use A.I. and supplement it with her own expertise. She found that process more time-consuming than transcribing on her own, because the A.I. butchered the medical terms. Still, the jobs disappeared.
“My job went completely,” said Ms. Mwangi, who now advocates for better pay and working conditions for gig workers.
Kenya’s outsourcing push brought jobs, but also a backlash. Firms hired by American tech giants faced criticism for low pay and poor working conditions.
That led to a pullback. Sama, a company that hired Kenyans to police user-generated content for Meta, cut back in the country. Scale AI, a start-up that hires people to train A.I. models, discontinued some Kenyan operations.
A.I.’s abilities continue to advance. One test from Scale AI and the Center for A.I. Safety tries to quantify A.I.’s ability to do online freelance work like product design and data analysis. Last October, leading A.I. models completed 2.5 percent of the tasks. By July, they completed 16 percent.
The ‘Humanizers’
Many who grew up doing essay writing and other gig work are now struggling to find a way back into the labor force.
Alex Munyua, 30, an industrial chemist who worked in the essay business because it was more lucrative, briefly performed data labeling and social media moderation after the industry declined. Now that work has also gone.
“Some have gone back to the villages,” he said. “There are those that tried other sectors, but they were frustrated because they couldn’t get formal jobs.”
Kenya is being buffeted by economic turbulence, with 40 percent of its more than 54 million people living in poverty. Tech jobs are scarce, despite a start-up scene.
Richard Eshilache, 38, built a profitable career in essay writing and said he employed more than 100 writers in 2022. He worked for some overseas students so long that one sent him his diploma.
“He told me it is for the two of us,” Mr. Eshilache said.
He is now trying to embrace A.I. for jobs editing photos and data annotation. None of it pays as well as essay writing.
John Tanui, principal secretary in the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy, stood by Kenya’s economic potential as an outsourcing hub, saying it would “unlock opportunities for our young people.”
Yet what jobs remain in essay writing are mainly for “humanizers,” who edit papers written by A.I. to avoid detection from the cheating software used by many universities.
Alphline, who began essay writing in 2021 and gave only her first name for fear of harming future job prospects, said business was as good as ever. With A.I., she can do more work, using the technology to quickly write a first draft and then writing through it herself. She eschews A.I. tools designed to disguise A.I. writing as human, preferring her own touch.
“I can clearly tell a paper that’s A.I. generated compared to one that’s human generated,” she said. “But for a student that doesn’t have that human writing experience, they can get caught.”
For Mr. Bundi, the transition has been difficult. He said he missed the intellectual wrestling match of learning new subjects and writing under a tight deadline, as well as working with some students from when they were freshmen through graduate school.
“It was like getting a parallel education,” he said.
Mr. Bundi sometimes wonders what his life would have been like if he had stayed in public health.
“All my peers that started in 2015 after graduation, they rose through the ranks,” he said. “Now if I go back, I’ll start at an entry level working for somebody who graduated just last year.”
Edwin Okoth contributed reporting from Nairobi.
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