More than 40,000 Kenyans who once earned a living writing academic assignments for overseas university students are facing an uncertain future as artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly replaces human ghostwriters.
The essay-writing industry has been a major source of income for highly educated young Kenyans, particularly in Nairobi, who use their English-language skills to complete assignments for students in Western countries.
According to The New York Times, up to 40,000 people in Nairobi once worked in the ghostwriting business. The industry has since declined sharply as students increasingly turn to AI tools such as ChatGPT to write their essays.
Among those affected is 34-year-old Theresios Bundi, who moved to Nairobi in 2011 and initially took up ghostwriting as a side job.
Kenyans queue for Jobs in Nairobi.
PCS
He turned it into a full-time occupation after graduating with a degree in public health in 2015. Bundi was paid between Ksh5,200 and Ksh9,100 for each assignment and wrote more than 2,500 essays over 12 years.
At the height of the business, he earned at least five times what a typical public health worker could make. Although he felt guilty about helping students cheat, Bundi considered himself partly a tutor and continued with the work.
The arrival of ChatGPT changed the business, however, with orders falling sharply and rates offered to writers declining.
“I never imagined AI could do this kind of work,” Bundi told The New York Times.
The disruption has also affected Kenyans who built larger businesses around ghostwriting. Some expanded their operations to employ dozens of writers but have since moved into fields such as photo editing, while others have struggled to find work that matches their previous earnings.
Other former ghostwriters have moved into areas such as data labelling and social media content moderation.
However, some of these emerging digital jobs are also becoming harder to secure as AI capabilities continue to expand.
The shift comes as Kenya grapples with limited formal employment opportunities for its growing pool of graduates.
The country produces more than 100,000 university graduates annually, while about 80 per cent of jobs are in the informal sector, making digital work an important source of income for many young people.
An image of Chat GPT- an artificial intelligence-based extension that generates text from any genre within seconds.
Techweez