Thousands of Kenyans who have made a living for years by writing assignments and papers for students abroad have begun losing their jobs as artificial intelligence advances. Speaking to The New York Times, 34-year-old Teresios Bundi said he entered the business after moving to Nairobi in 2011, earned 7 dollars in three hours on his first assignment, and wrote more than 2 thousand 500 papers over 12 years. Bundi, who earned a public health degree in 2015, said writing brought him at least 5 times what he could earn in his own field.
Researchers estimate that at least 40 thousand people in Nairobi do this work. However, demand declined after OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022. Kenyans who transcribed meetings, moderated social media content, and labeled data also lost their jobs. In a country where more than 100 thousand university students graduate each year, around 80% of jobs are informal, while youth unemployment exceeds 25%. While some former writers work as “humanizers,” Bundi supports young people in the digital economy.
Why it matters
This development shows that the impact of artificial intelligence is not limited to technology companies, but directly affects the sources of income of educated young people and freelancers in Kenya. In a country where informal employment is widespread and youth unemployment is high, the decline in assignment writing is more than the loss of a single occupational group; it is also narrowing the livelihood options available to young people with university degrees. The decline in work such as meeting transcription, content moderation, and data labeling shows that similar pressure is spreading to different areas of digital labor. Although former writers’ shift toward humanizing AI-generated texts points to a new field of work, it remains unclear how many people this will provide with a regular income and what options those who have lost their jobs will turn to.