Long written remotely by Kenyan freelancers for American students, university assignments and essays are now produced by chatbots.
Kenya had established itself over the years as a major hub for writing essays and academic assignments for North American students, a sector that accounted for about 70% of the country's online freelance activity and made Kenya the second largest African market for online freelancing, behind Egypt. A government program launched in 2016 had even trained graduates to navigate platforms like Upwork to practice this profession.
The arrival of consumer chatbots has reshuffled the cards: several analyses suggest the disappearance of about 40,000 jobs in this sector in the space of two years. Copywriters who still manage to find orders have seen their monthly incomes melt from a range of $900 to $1,200 to just $500 to $800 today, according to a survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. More broadly, the phenomenon raises questions about the future of a whole fringe of the global online self-employment economy, which is particularly exposed to text generation tools.
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