ChatGPT collapses Kenya's academic ghostwriting industry
In Kenya, ChatGPT wiped out an entire business model built around writing academic papers for foreign students, according to a New York Times report cited by The Decoder. Thousands of Kenyans wrote essays and term papers for university students in the US and UK in fields such as medicine, computer science and engineering, sometimes logging into the clients' own university accounts to submit the work. At its peak early this decade, at least 40,000 people worked in the industry in Nairobi alone, according to researchers cited in the report.
One of them, Teresios Bundi, 34, wrote more than 2,500 papers over twelve years and later charged $40 to $70 per text. After ChatGPT launched in 2022, prices and orders collapsed. The damage was not confined to essay writing: other gig work in the country also dried up, including transcription, data annotation and content moderation for Meta.
The collapse lands on an economy the government itself steered toward this kind of work. Kenya's government had deliberately promoted online gig work starting in 2016, and companies like Samasource helped label AI training data; about 80 percent of jobs in the country are informal. What is left of the essay-writing trade, per the New York Times, are "humanizers" who rework AI-generated text to slip past plagiarism checks. Oxford professor Mark Graham expects similar upheavals worldwide, and Bundi himself sees the disruption spreading well beyond gig writers: "A.I. is coming for bankers, for accountants, it's coming for engineers, and A.I. will come for architects. It's coming for everybody."
Key facts
- At its peak early this decade, at least 40,000 people worked in Nairobi's academic ghostwriting industry, writing papers for foreign university students, according to researchers.
- Teresios Bundi, 34, wrote more than 2,500 papers over twelve years and later charged $40 to $70 per text; after ChatGPT launched in 2022, prices and orders collapsed.
- Other gig work in Kenya also dried up, including transcription, data annotation and content moderation for Meta.
- Kenya's government had deliberately promoted online gig work starting in 2016; about 80 percent of jobs in the country are informal.
- What remains of the trade are "humanizers" who rework AI-generated text to evade plagiarism checks, and Oxford professor Mark Graham expects similar upheavals worldwide.
Why it matters
This is one of the first documented cases of a large-scale gig-work industry being wiped out wholesale by a general-purpose chatbot rather than automated piecemeal. Nairobi's academic ghostwriting trade did not shrink gradually as ChatGPT improved; it collapsed sharply after ChatGPT's 2022 launch, taking prices and order volume down together. It is a concrete data point for what AI-driven labor displacement looks like in practice, in an economy where informal work already accounts for about 80 percent of jobs.
Who it affects
The people directly affected are the Kenyan writers themselves, workers like Teresios Bundi who spent twelve years building a livelihood around writing papers in medicine, computer science and engineering for students in the US and UK. It also affects Kenya's wider gig-work sector: transcription, data annotation and content moderation for Meta, work the government had deliberately promoted since 2016, also dried up. Foreign students who relied on paid ghostwriters lose an option, and universities face a workforce that has shifted toward disguising AI-generated text rather than producing original human writing for hire.
How to use it
There is no product or service here to adopt; this is a labor-market case study, not a tool release. The closest actionable read for anyone tracking AI's economic footprint is the pattern itself: an entire white-collar-adjacent gig industry, dependent on manual production of written text, went from tens of thousands of workers to a shrunken trade centered on "humanizing" AI output within a few years of a single consumer chatbot's launch.
How solid is it
The account rests on New York Times reporting, relayed here by The Decoder, and includes named, on-record sources: Teresios Bundi speaking about his own twelve-year career and earnings, and Oxford professor Mark Graham on the broader trend. The 40,000-worker peak figure is attributed to unnamed "researchers" rather than a named study, and no current headcount or income figures are given for the industry today beyond the statement that prices and orders collapsed.
Risks and caveats
Several specifics are left open in the source: no exact year is given for the industry's peak beyond "early this decade," no source or study is named for the 40,000-worker figure, and no detail is given on how widespread the "humanizer" work now is or how it operates. Bundi's current occupation or income after the collapse is not stated either. The story is also a single-country snapshot; Graham's expectation that similar upheavals will occur worldwide is his forecast, not yet a documented pattern elsewhere in the report.
“A.I. is coming for bankers, for accountants, it's coming for engineers, and A.I. will come for architects. It's coming for everybody.”
— Teresios Bundi