Tech giveth, tech taketh away
The rise and fall of online writing livelihoods in Nairobi
By Cate Wanjala & Julie Zollmann
The role of AI in creating or eliminating jobs for African youth is a matter of hot debate. Various prognostications are often lacking an empirical perspective on what is happening now and what it portends for the future. In some sectors, dramatic disruption is already underway.
Online writing is one such space. In 2019, while studying the ways digitization was changing livelihoods in Kenya, we interviewed young people engaged in online writing, including content creation for websites and blogs as well as “academic writing,” essentially writing essays and other homework for students in the United States and UK. The latter had become a substantial industry, likely generating income for tens of thousands of Kenyans.
The academic writers we met were mostly young people, one to five years out of university. Many had done a little bit of academic writing as a side hustle while studying, only to turn it into a serious gig after graduation when confronting a job market devoid of opportunities for people like them. Skills honed at university—excellent writing in English, research skills, and time management—helped Kenyan graduates thrive as academic writers. They bought, curated, and sold expensive, high-performing accounts (often with a mzungu, white person, avatar) and hired teams of writers to help them take on more and deliver faster on assignments. Full-time writers were bringing in upwards of KSh 40,000 (about $400 at the time) per month.
It wasn’t a great job. It required working long hours and being available at a moment’s notice to revise an assignment. When colleges were in session, most had to work overnight shifts, responding to requests for jobs and completing work on schedule for US time zones. Groups of young men often shared apartments to better share costs and coordinate the servicing of accounts. Some told us they had little time to see their friends and family. However, the reliable, relatively high incomes helped them justify the sacrifices and the moral compromise involved in helping foreign students cheat.
In 2019, digitization was an enabler. It connected these skilled young people with a market that valued their particular skills. It helped overcome unemployment challenges at home. Six years later, the number of jobs is far fewer and only the best writers can maintain their livelihoods. Last week we caught up with four academic writers we had interviewed in 2019 to understand what’s shifted and what it meant for them. We heard about big changes:
Demand
The number of jobs going through academic writing platforms has dropped dramatically. Presumably many students are using AI directly for more assignments, meaning there is less work for Kenyan writers. Collins[1] (28) went from flying high between 2018 to 2022 to a crash in 2023 with the introduction of ChatGPT. He went from doing two jobs a day to two a week. “ChatGPT can do in two minutes what it used to take me a whole day. And it has better grammar and such,” Collins told us.
James (35), who used to subcontract a number of other writers, has had to greatly reduce the number of writers he works with. There aren’t enough jobs, and, he said, “You have to work with the person who can agree to the new terms.”
Falling rates
Those new terms involve greatly reduced pay. Prices dropped from around $6 per page to $2-3. Some students use AI to generate their essays and then hire academic writers just for “paraphrasing” or humanizing work to get around AI detection at their universities. This work pays less than original writing.
Alternative job creation in Kenya (and elsewhere) hasn’t accelerated in the midst of this transition, meaning many people are still looking for academic writing jobs even as the number of assignments and pay have reduced. Some writers are reportedly trying to make extra money by selling training services to aspiring writers. Some of our respondents felt this was exploitative given the dearth of real opportunities to earn a living in academic writing today.
Competition over even low-paying jobs remains fierce. Collins told us there used to be about 10 bids per job. That exploded to more than 100 within two minutes of a new assignment posting.
AI detection and the “authenticity” premium
Academic writing platforms have introduced AI detection tools and zero-tolerance policies for AI usage, positioning themselves as a premium alternative for students who might otherwise use Chat GPT directly. If submitted work is suspected to be AI-generated, writers are fined and their accounts blocked. Judith (29) explained, “You can write a project even from scratch, and yet it is flagged as AI-generated. You have to check everything with those detection tools and keep changing it until it’s okay…For my account, there is a fine of $500 for any work flagged as AI-generated.”
“You prefer to even make sure there are some errors in the work so that it is regarded as human,” Collins told us.
AI tools that humanize AI text have also emerged, and are being used by academic writers to help with work that is sent to them to humanize and also to ensure their original work passes AI screening. Account managers now often run completed work through Turnitin, an AI detector that is also used by universities, to check that work submitted is not AI-generated.
Judith does not use AI to generate content. She finds that actually doing the work makes it easier to avoid AI detection. She uses Grammarly to check her work, which often flags her work as AI-generated. But when she writes herself, Turnitin usually flags only about 10% of her work as AI-generated, which for her is easier to fix than when the percentage is much higher. It also saves her money on Turnitin, since she doesn’t have to run the same piece of work through the detection software as many times. Junior writers often find the constant revision to get to 0% AI detection to be exhausting, especially given low payment rates. Reportedly, this is leading to significant churn for junior writers.
This strategy means Judith is still getting work and in high-paying accounts. These days, this kind of human authenticity pays. Judith told us, “Usually the students come to us after they’ve been caught using AI. They don’t realize it can do things like hallucinate sources.”
Some writers we spoke with diversified their writing types and clients into areas that are less stringent around the use of AI. Tasks for content creation for blogs, direct/offline clients, and clients looking for technical tasks (like audits, online research, and R programming) are more flexible on the use of AI. “Brian” (25) now focuses on those technical tasks, and AI makes him much faster at task completion. He bids on every possible technical project and can do three or four tasks per day with AI help compared to just one per day before.
One other area that still needs human support is “chat moderation.” While often sold to digital workers as merely moderating chats, it often involves supplying content on adult chat websites. Out of desperation, Collins gave this a shot, before walking away. “That thing, it is not good for your mental health.”
Appreciation of asset values for good accounts
Many had invested hundreds of dollars in buying highly-rated academic writing accounts only to lose them overnight to suspected use of AI. Few could afford to buy a new account and start over with remaining accounts that have appreciated in value. Group accounts that used to go for KES 50,000-70,000 (about $387-542) on platforms like Essay Pro are now selling for around KES 500,000 ($3,870). One writer told us it’s worth it, but only if you have good writers who can deliver original work.
Of the four academic writers we spoke with, only Judith is still doing academic writing full-time. She has also maintained a staff of four who support her work. But she would advise other young people to look for other opportunities. Academic writing has never been easy, and it’s much harder now. Beating AI detection even with authentic work is exhausting, often for low pay. When thinking about whether even her work will be replaced she told us, “We have never known the future…we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.” She’s also a little sad about what AI means for the future. Before AI some students were paying people like her to cheat on their homework, but now “No one is studying. All you need to do is show up in class. That’s it.”
The constant of change
What is being demanded of all four of the young people we spoke with is constant adaptation to survive. While Judith is still writing, she must keep up with constant changes in the academic platforms and AI tools, just to stay in place. Collins is creatively searching out new ways to make money through poultry farming, and he’s trying to use AI to shorten the learning curve, helping him establish more quickly. While AI has decimated opportunities in academic writing, it has made it easier to take on more technical tasks. It leaves behind (for now) some opportunities in humanizing AI texts and for the dismal work of chat moderation. Even with college degrees in fields like engineering, people like James and Collins have little hope of landing a steady job or reliable livelihood to plan a life around.
The ways that AI disrupts livelihoods in Africa are bound to be different than the West. The workforce is atomized into many diverse domains dominated by the self-employed, making wider trends will be difficult to disentangle. Already reeling from eroding purchasing power, African young people are likely in for a bumpy, uncertain ride. Staying on the pulse of change in terms of actual worker experiences is going to be critical to shaping a more hopeful future.
[1] All names changed.