In 2024 there was this documentary called the Shadow Scholars, shown on the U.K.’s Channel 4 last year with the title “The Shadow Scholars Fake Essay Scandal.” It was about the army of educated but underemployed Kenyan people who had been using gig work platforms to link up with Western college students and write their academic essays for them.
It did exactly what you would want a documentary like this to do: went to Nairobi and let you feel like you were spending time with the actual people making their living in this way.
The people in the movie sometimes come across as defensive, but others are just self-aware, mercenary nerds who work super hard, writing thousands of words per day. In the most pleasant of cases, they actually seem to love the work and take pride in learning about the topics and writing believably. “A journalist would do a different paper from a criminal law student. They would have different perspectives,” one of the essay writers says.
Toward the beginning of the documentary, Oxford sociologist (and the movie’s onscreen host) Patricia Kingori is looking into how the essay mill industry had been described in Western academic literature, finding terms like “plagiarism” and “academic fraud.” Watching the Shadow Scholars, it was impossible not to wonder how these people are doing just a short time later, now that AI has proliferated.
And judging from a new story in the New York Times, the answer is: probably not great.
The Times’ story is not about the specific people from the documentary—there were an estimated 40,000 people in Kenya making their money this way at one point—but it’s about the same profession, in the same location, and AI seems to have decimated it.
The Times notes that other, similar work in Kenya has dried up as well—notably transcription and translations, which started getting clobbered by AI software even before the rise of ChatGPT.
The Times notes that:
One test from Scale AI and the Center for A.I. Safety tries to quantify A.I.’s ability to do online freelance work like product design and data analysis. Last October, leading A.I. models completed 2.5 percent of the tasks. By July, they completed 16 percent.
But of course, AI doesn’t have to formally complete any freelance assignments in order to put the academic cheating industry out of work. The students simply use the chatbots. Then again, so does at least one of the essay writers, per the Times:
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.
Though not mentioned in the Times’ piece, the rise of Pangram and other relatively reliable AI detectors is clearly a factor here. A Western student who knows full-strength slop won’t do the trick, but is still determined to cheat, can hire Alphline to generate slop filtered through a human.
The days when cheating students were handing in bespoke products written by the greatest artisans in the cheating industry are clearly over. RIP to a bygone era.
Read the full article here
