American students used to pay Kenyans to cheat for them, writing essays on subjects the students were too lazy to learn and too incompetent to comment on.
Now? The next generation of self-created imbeciles is using AI to cheat for them, and it's destroying the lives of Kenyans who had built prosperous lives for themselves and, in the process, getting a broader post-secondary education than they ever expected.
"AI has destroyed Kenyan jobs because American college students no longer hire them to write fake college essays" is not a framing I expected even the NYT to have pic.twitter.com/7DlifkjLE2
— Trevor McKendrick (@TrevMcKendrick) September 7, 2026
At least I assume the latter to be true. For all I know, university education these days is so ridiculously bad that essays written by Kenyans who don't know much are good enough to get kids through college with grades good enough to fool employers into hiring them.
But I still hope Kenya sent its best and its brightest into the online cheating business.
An incredible article packed with bitter and disgraceful irony. Underscores the fakery of so much of what is called college in the US.
— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreytucker) September 7, 2026
Kenyans Did College Students’ Homework for Years. Then A.I. Arrived. https://t.co/Cspd5sTlmw
It never occurred to me that cheating in high school and college is so prevalent that significant chunks of some Third-World economies have come to depend on an industry built on it, but this New York Times piece focuses on the collapse of an industry that provided 40,000 jobs to well-educated Kenyans who gave up careers in professional industries to make more money helping Americans cheat.
The Kenyan government never formally endorsed the industry, but it certainly knew that so-called "gig" work was a growing part of its economy, and it was one of the only outlets for the employment of the significant number of college-educated Kenyans who graduate to find an economy that is ill-suited to employ them in domestic work.
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.
The fact that there are so many otherwise unemployable college graduates in Kenya who are smart enough to complete college work for American students speaks badly of Kenya's allocation of economic resources, but speaks even more badly of America's education system, in which students have become so poorly educated and lazy that they outsource their education to people halfway around the world.
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?
In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT.
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.”
I use AI to transcribe video, since it is quick and more accurate than I can be, but I could never imagine outsourcing intellectual work to a machine. Not only is it cheating, obviously, but it would turn me into a human character from WALL-E: fat, useless, and a processing station for food that comes in one and out the other.
That is a future, apparently, that many of America's youth have decided to embrace, although they do retain the capacity to produce TikTok videos and complain about oppression and colonization. At least they ingest that intellectual content while in high school and college, to our detriment.
Is it any wonder that we keep pumping out graduates with all the credentials in the world and the intellectual capacity of chickens with their heads cut off?
Alas, AI has replaced human beings in the cheating industry, though a small market remains for "humanizers" who transform AI-produced essays into something the AI-driven AI detectors can't catch 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.”
It's easy enough to point the finger at AI for the decline in thinking capacity that seems so common in American students; performance has declined, and many students barely know how to read and write.
But as the Kenyan example shows, the problem lies much deeper: too many Americans don't want to think or work, and high school and college teachers seem happy enough with that, or at least their administrators do.
Of course, a core group of intellectual workers has to remain to make all this work. Smart, entrepreneurial people create the tools that let the masses be lazy and cheat, but how long can a system that prioritizes fake achievements and useless credentials survive?
I don't know, and I am scared we may soon find out as the socialists gain political influence with the intellectually lobotomized.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.
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