NYT: ChatGPT Wiped Kenya's 40,000-Writer Ghostwriting Industry

Up to 40,000 people once wrote essays for Western college students out of Nairobi. That figure comes from a New York Times feature on the collapse of Kenya's contract-cheating industry, which the paper says vanished within two years of ChatGPT's 2022 launch.

Teresios Bundi is the piece's main character. He moved from a farming village to Nairobi in 2011, finished a public-health degree in 2015, and then spent twelve years ghost-writing over 2,500 essays at $40 to $70 apiece. That paid at least five times what the public-health field offered him locally.

Then the orders stopped. Students, according to the Times, "made a simple calculation: Why pay a freelancer in Kenya when ChatGPT could do the job?" Richard Esilaba, who at his peak employed 100 ghostwriters, has closed down. Writers who used to clear $900 to $1,200 a month now report $500 to $800.

Bundi shut his operation. He now works for a German government development organization, helping young Kenyans find opportunities in the same digital economy that used to pay his rent.

It's the third jobs alert we've run this week, and one of the few where the labor market on the receiving end of a generative-AI substitution has already been counted and named.