10 ms·
AI is taking the jobs of Kenyans who write essays for U.S. college students
- luxuryballs 4y agoif I was a prof. I would let them generate GPT essays in class and submit them, then print them out double spaced and have the students edit the essay for the rest of the class to submit for evaluation, or something like that
- askafriend 4y agoUS College students could take those jobs away at any time if they just wrote their own essays. I don't see the point of this article. Maybe the smart Kenyans are themselves using ChatGPT to 5x their throughput and essay-writing business in the meantime.
- crop_rotation 4y agoSmart Kenyans doing this work most likely can not afford GPT Plus for GPT4, and the free version doesn't work during peak hours.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoLuckily they're in Kenya, which is UTC+3, so their business hours presumably don't coincide with NA/EU West peak hours.
- coding123 4y agoI haven't had the free version poop out on me for more than 15 minutes.
- plugin-baby 4y agoAt 20$/month, someone earning 1000$/month would have no trouble affording it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ben_w 4y agoI'm seeing a lot of conflicting estimates on Google for Kenyan average income, and nothing at all about the distribution. Does anyone know what fraction of Kenyans have incomes of at least 1000 USD/month?
- kennlebu 4y agoI am a Kenyan living in Kenya, and I can confidently estimate that it's less than 2% of the entire population
- snackwalrus 4y agoFor starters, one of the ones mentioned in the article…
- gus_massa 4y agoIf they can't afford it, it means that they are charging less than GPT4 and they can compeat in price.
- crop_rotation 4y agoCharging less than GPT4 doesn't make sense. GPT4 is 20 USD per month and too many prompts. It is much harder for a human to be skilled enough to write good essays and survive at 20 USD a month. Competing with GPT4 on price for boilerplate essay is just pointless.
- RecycledEle 4y agoI am not an expert in this unethical market, but I think competition for essays to plagiarize would be on a per-essay basis. The competition would be between a $20 per month OpenAI membership and paying a Kenyan by the essay. The Kenyan could use OpenAI for drafts and charge $5 per essay. (S)he would earn more than $20 per month.
- plagiarist 4y agoIt is interesting as a marker of how far the technology has come. Writing essays that are coherent enough to be submitted as coursework, for arbitrary topics or subjects, is something we would have thought an AI would have difficulty with years ago.
- sam0x17 4y agoTo a certain extent I think it also exposes how much busy-work there really is out there. A lot of people have been talking about ChatGPT as the ultimate bullshit artist, well if that is true, the stuff it is producing perfectly would be what, bullshit in the first place?
- UnpossibleJim 4y agoIt can't be too much of a surprise that a lot of white collar jobs involve a fair amount of BS. I have 3 to 4 meetings a day and only 1 or 2 are really necessary =[
- cherrycherry98 4y agoEssays produced for school aren't of much value for someone else to read. The value is to the writer who gets to practice synthesizing ideas and communicating them into words. There's still value to be had in learning how to communicate effectively in writing.
- carlmr 4y agoI underestimated the power of writing myself when I was in high school. I always preferred math, physics, programming, and chemistry, to the vague, almost arbitrary nature of writing good essays. As I've gotten older I've noticed how my day job depends more on communicating effectively than solving hard technical problems. The best technical idea doesn't serve you if you can't communicate it to others.
- thfuran 4y agoIs having kids learn to read and write bullshit because text to speech and speech recognition software exist? The point of school work isn't the output, it's learning.
- elicash 4y ago> I don't see the point of this article. You can draw whatever conclusions you want, the "point" is mostly to make you aware of new facts, though perspectives are also quoted in the piece -- including yours! Specifically, one quoted person talks about both pros and cons and says: "This means they can now spend more time being creative, and have better articles because of the time ChatGPT saves them."
- burkaman 4y agoI think this article is interesting because it's real-world evidence of an impact GPT is having. I've seen speculation from people about how education might change, but this makes it much more real. GPT is providing work that students used to get from real professional writers.
- dj_mc_merlin 4y ago> if they just wrote their own essays. Which some significant part of the college student body is not willing to. Having the option to do something without the will to do so is practically equivalent to not being able to. The kind of people who would look for someone to write their essays is also very likely to opt for the lowest friction method, and chatGPT is obviously that. The article mentions that low word count easier answers are where he primarily felt a hit, and chatGPT would be good at those.
- Mezzie 4y ago> The kind of people who would look for someone to write their essays is also very likely to opt for the lowest friction method, and chatGPT is obviously that. This is and isn't true. I made a living doing high-skill essay writing for a while - I specialized in upper-level undergraduate or graduate level papers with a 24-48 hour turn around time. I charged out the nose. For the American students, you're right. For the foreign students at US universities (the majority of my clients), they had a ton of money to throw around, a lack of understanding of how the systems worked, and strong status incentives to get a degree by any means necessary. Most of them were also privileged enough to never have to learn planning and therefore left things to the last moment, which is where I came in. I'd expect LLMs to contribute to the bifurcation of the cheating market with domestic students making use of them but rich foreign students not so much. (I did this because if I made too much I'd lose my healthcare and since I have a condition where my meds cost 300k+/yr + makes 40+ hour weeks difficult, the 'logical' thing to do was work the grey market since I could have healthcare and work the 20-30 hours/week that was comfortable for me. Now that I have healthcare that isn't in danger of being taken away if I'm too successful, I no longer engage in this.)
- tyoma 4y agoI once lived next to a woman who did this as her side hustle. She once did pretty much all of a master’s degree for a wealthy middle eastern student, but her clients included plenty of US-raised students as well. This is far from a US-only thing though; degrees serve as gatekeepers to status and positions worldwide, so there is a market that will be filled. As an example, my grandfather did similar work as a side job — in the USSR. The real qualification for many director level posts was “on good terms with the right people in the party”… but the formal qualifications required some related degree to the (factory, institute, etc.) function. If you could not get the degree yourself, you found someone to help. I would not at all be surprised if the situation is identical in modern China.
- MattGaiser 4y agoYou used to pay someone to do your laundry. Then the washing machine came along.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y agoAnd now you can pay someone to use a bigger washing machine to do your laundry along with that of others. Everybody wins!
- dangerwill 4y ago> Maybe the smart Kenyans are themselves using ChatGPT to 5x their throughput and essay-writing business in the meantime. Why in the world do you think a lazy US college student would go to the effort to arrange an international money transfer to get an essay written by ChatGPT and edited by someone, when they can just get it from ChatGPT directly and cut out the middle man? It's not like ChatGPT is obscure or unknown at this point. This is just a Steven Pinker-esque attempt to sound clever while handwaving away hardship and not realizing what you are saying is utter nonsense.
- mnky9800n 4y agoif the students had something interesting to write about then they couldn't really get a kenyan to write it for them. this model only works because the student's are being asked to do busy work.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoWriting is like a muscle, one has to practice. That's not busywork
- andsoitis 4y ago> if the students had something interesting to write about then they couldn't really get a kenyan to write it for them. Can you elaborate?
- sdfghswe 4y agoI'll elaborate. There's this strain of anti-intellectualism that blames everything on education being a farce. It never actually clarifies how anything could be better, it just states that it's bad as it is.
- govolckurself 4y agoAn admission essay is hardly education, it's a pro forma hoop to jump through to get into college (especially now that more and more are ignoring test scores). So you have to invent eight hobbies and convince a bunch of bored administrators that playing the cello since you were four has really helped you overcome adversity, but it's also made you disciplined and ready to take on the world. I'm very pro-education, and anti-college admissions essay.
- rajin444 4y agoThere’s also a strain of anti intellectualism that assumes every human should be forced through 12ish years of schooling and every human should achieve the same base level of results. Public education for all is not much different than the American idea of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. Leave education for those that either want or can benefit from it. Come up with more efficient systems for the rest of the masses.
- ETH_start 4y agoMore generally though, ChatGPT makes workers in Kenya vastly more useful. It can generate high-quality English content from a prompt written in Swahili, or broken English, meaning a much greater number of people in Kenya can do work that's useful in the global economy. It's a skills amplifier.
- ghiculescu 4y agoThese Kenyans are writing college level essays without chatgpt’s help. They clearly don’t have problems writing in English, and yet this is the work in the global economy they’ve chosen. I suspect if a better paying option existed they’d pick that. So your thesis that this is good for the Kenyans is easily disproven.
- ETH_start 4y agoFar more Kenyans were not qualified to do this work, and many amongst those, with ChatGPT, now are. The ones who were doing the essay-writing meanwhile can now take on more complex tasks with the aid of ChatGPT.
- rwmj 4y agoThat works for as long as it takes for the purchaser to realise that they can also type a prompt into ChatGPT.
- ETH_start 4y agoFor tasks below a certain level of complexity, like writing an essay, yes. But many projects are too complex to get done by a single prompt even if that prompt were perfect. Many take many iterations of prompts, combined with other tasks, to complete. It's those more complex projects - that many workers in Kenya previously did not have the skills to complete - and that individuals cannot trivially get ChatGPT to do for them, that many workers in Kenya can now do by utilizing ChatGPT.
- robjan 4y agoWhatever prompt the Kenyans in this scenario are receiving can just be entered directly into ChatGPT
- hospitalJail 4y agoI wonder if this is going to level the playing field a bit. People who cheated in school had a bit of an advantage, but with these advances, it forces teachers to find ways to test people in different ways. I once had a teacher who gave us open book, open note, etc... for chemistry. The trick was, you had ~60 minutes to do it. If you didn't practice, you'd never finish the test in time. I also had a different teacher in thermo 2 give us two different insane problems, and we had to solve them. GPT would easily fail at this. It involved drawing a few diagrams of layers and calculations. (although, I wonder if you could train LLMs on this problem) Still, you had to do this in class, no calculator, just set up the equations.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- VeninVidiaVicii 4y agoYeah, same for my prokaryotic molecular biology class. The questions were 100 percent theoretical, and you were even allowed to take the test at home. After the first one, it made sense why — the questions are totally ungooglable, and working with anyone else would’ve immediately polluted my mind and been obvious.
- the_third_wave 4y ago> the questions are totally ungooglable If you remember one of the questions it would be interesting to know what the current crop of LLM chat bots return in answer. If you know the correct answer to the question it would be especially interesting to know whether the prose the things return has any semblance of truth to it.
- hgsgm 4y agoIt's not that interesting yet. AltmanAI isn't claiming yet that GPT can solve unique problems.
- 3pt14159 4y agoWell, the issue with take home tests isn't the Googling per-se, it's the hiring out of the work. My preference for university exams was a simple, single page cheatsheet that you had to make yourself. You could write the finicky stuff that is hard to remember on it, but you couldn't fast-learn the material like you could from a book. Though I do remember writing out little programs for the weirder stuff like required coverage over concrete reinforcement bars. Which felt a bit like cheating at the time.
- boredumb 4y agoFirst they came for the kenyan plagiarists, and I said nothing
- jagged-chisel 4y ago"ghost writers"
- InCityDreams 4y agoBetter to keep saying nothing - are the Kenyans plagiarising anything?
- BlackSwanMan 4y agoThis will be great for Kenya and other countries like it. A really bad problem in these countries is their best in brightest are too busy doing service jobs for Westerners than doing the work in manufacturing and infrastructure that builds their capital base.
- mrleinad 4y agoThey take those jobs for westerners because their local companies pay them shit in comparison. So this is going to make them poorer and cut an income source for the country as well.
- nivenkos 4y agoBut that in turn creates political and economic pressure to improve the situation.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nmz 4y agoThat already existed in the first place. Poor countries are not poor by choice. And removing avenues of financial support (and an import at that) is not a net positive.
- carlosjobim 4y agoMaybe some of them start their own companies? "Income source for the country"? Having your brightest employed in foreign ventures is a great loss for the country.
- Riverheart 4y agoPer the comment below some have companies formed around this work. Also, as long as they are spending that income locally they’re still bringing wealth to their country which is a good thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654707
- steeleyespan 4y agoI'm literally having ChatGPT write articles using the Python API and a simple loop right now, lol. Incredibly cheap. About $5 for 2,000. Honestly, it does a way better job than the people I've tried to hire through Upwork and other places.
- sebzim4500 4y agoWhat are you doing with these articles? Surely no one particularly wants to read either the ChatGPT ones or the ones by random people on Upwork.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dist-epoch 4y agoMaybe he's one of the Kenyans and he's subcontracting further.
- steeleyespan 4y agoIt is my honest opinion that ChatGPT outputs more useful and accurate content than the non-native-english-speaker content that dominates Google listings these days. I've read so much complete garbage trying to make a basic search, and that's why everyone uses Reddit and says ChatGPT will replace Google. Soon all that content will be replaced by GPT output, not my doing, but it's happening. I don't know the consequences of language models recycling their own content, etc. but it's already here. Probably input will be limited to some authenticated trusted sources if possible.
- axus 4y agoIn the grim dark future of Search Engine Optimization, there is only ChatGPT
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dist-epoch 4y agoDoes anyone have a GPT bot for HN commenting? Honestly I'm wasting too much time here. I wish I could feed the bot with my beliefs (Electron bad, nuclear good, Windows 11 a train-wreck, AI a bubble, ...) and it would post for me as appropriate.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoWell, they obviously did not work hard to get reincarnated in the us and preach to the rest of the world in lenghty articles about how to work hard, articles written by kenyans most likely. Sarcasmsnake eats its tail, to big to fail..
- ghiculescu 4y agoI can’t believe all the comments arguing that this is good for the Kenyans. Yes, obviously this industry shouldn’t exist. But it does. Lots of industries exist purely to fix inefficiencies in others. If there was other global knowledge work available to Kenyans I’m sure they’d take it. These people are writing college level essays! They are probably better writers than most of us. When futurists talk about industrial revolutions they all agree that in the long term it works out but in the short term it causes lots of pain and suffering for those whose work is displaced. If you’re an AI futurist you should be intellectually honest and admit that chatGPT is probably not going to be good for Kenya. Trying to dress it up as if there’s absolutely no downside to this is just lying to yourself.
- antibasilisk 4y agotechnology is always good, and if it's not good it's the users fault, and if it's not the users fault then it's society's fault and if it's not society's fault then you're just backwards and you want to die in a cave from pneumonia
- ghiculescu 4y agoI actually do think technology is mostly good, I just don’t like when people pretend it doesn’t come with consequences they don’t like.
- tiedieconderoga 4y agoTechnology is neither good nor bad, it is neutral. How new technologies are used, however, depends on the people who reify them. We can apply them in ways that are helpful, harmful, or more often both. It is incumbent on us to figure out how to implement and regulate new tech so that it appeals to the better angels of our nature, rather than encouraging the atavistic Hobbes-ian instincts which successful societies must overcome.
- automatic6131 4y agoCan't you see how bad it for Kenya - or anywhere - for people bright enough to write college level essays to be wasting their time writing them for rich people studying in Western colleges? What you do for a living isn't neutral, there's an opportunity cost. That person in Kenya writing an essay for someone else isn't doing journalism or writing a great novel, or starting a business or whatever. Now, for sure, Kenya isn't the best place for doing those things anyway, but it's never going to be if a whole pool of labor is doing bullshit work like grinding out college-level essays. There's no path from where Kenya is today (not great, not as bad as you might think though) to where the West is where work like that is a part of its economy, is there?
- fnord77 4y agoI think chatGPT will filter out all the pointless activities human do just out of habit clearly essay writing is a bit pointless if it can be farmed off to someone else and the students are still able to graduate and function in careers
- mock-possum 4y agoGood. It’s unethical to profit off of helping other people cheat.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y agoBut it's OK to do it for free?
- mock-possum 4y agoHahaha, fair point, yes it is unethical to help people cheat in general, regardless of whether money changes hands.
- xwdv 4y agoKenyans are super cheap. With an average yearly income of roughly $2500 USD, that’s not even more than a single paycheck for a typical software developer. IMO, it doesn’t make sense to purchase expensive licensing to use GPT, when you could easily hire a living, breathing Kenyan to actually write stuff for you. With a bit of training, Kenyans can become well suited for general purpose organic workloads and open ended tasks requiring high degree of intelligence and subjective analytical skills. Horizontal scaling is relatively straightforward and Kenyans will cooperate with each other with very little configuration required. Kenyans also do not require nearly as much prompting as GPT due to their innate intuitive abilities and superior comprehension skills. They possess great capacity for novel creative thought without extra input stimulus. The typical downsides of organic computation pipelines still exist: Unlike an AI, Kenyans can suffer from burnout or have inconsistent performance metrics, they are also much slower to produce outputs. There is a high degree of variability between Kenyans due to poor quality control, nonetheless it is easy to replace a Kenyan with a new one. Consider Kenyans.
- dangerwill 4y agoThis is a simply evil way to talk about groups of people, even if this is tongue in cheek. The only thing different between Kenyans and Americans is the yearly income which isn't because "Kenyans are super cheap", it's because they are are undervalued and in the Imperial Periphery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periphery_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periphery_countries
- notch898c 4y agoIf Kenyans are truly economically undervalued you can create a mint for yourself by exploiting arbitrage in the marketplace.
- menacingly 4y agoThe form this argument always takes is: 1) undesirable_outcome will not happen, and here's a rational argument why. 2) ok, undesirable_outcome did happen but it wasn't undesirable in the first place and here's a rational argument why dismiss the concerns, then invalidate the concerns, it's how you keep progress moving
- elbigbad 4y agoThis outcome is desirable in the sense that we should live in a world where this cottage industry doesn’t exist, but it is undesirable that people are losing some of the best jobs available to them. Yes this is progress overall.
- adfgkihnq23r 4y agoI don't understand why people are so concerned about these new automatic plagiarizers. It has always been in the best interests of bad or lazy students to plagiarize. Plagiarism is low-risk if the plagiarizer has half a brain (i.e. doesn't copy and paste and doesn't use a famous source). It saves a ton of effort. It lets even an awful student produce a decent paper. These new tools make plagiarism easier, less risky, and lower-quality, but these are just matters of degree. Plagiarism is already rampant. These tools make existing plagiarists worse. I doubt they will create new plagiarists. (P.S. I say it's low risk because plagiarism can be difficult to prove. It's very easy to catch a plagiarist. A poor student who never shows up to class all of a sudden handing in lengthy papers using terms never covered in class rings alarm bells for any teacher.)
- danabrams 4y agoThis is why I don't think AI will be as world changing as many believe. If it just replaces human thought more inexpensively, we already have a technology that does that called outsourcing, and it has mixed results.
- sam_goody 4y agoThe difference is a) trust - many don't outsource because the are not willing to reveal company code, are worried the outsourcer will sell their logins, etc. b) availability - AI will drive your kid to school, do his schoolwork, choose him content to watch on his phone, and find you recipes. At some point it will likely also prepare the dish. c) cost (as you pointed out) - Even if you could send your kid to school by taxi, etc it would be prohibitively expensive. d) reliability - the level of AI is pretty low now, but as that improves you will get a less mixed bag than outsourcing.
- mysterydip 4y ago> a) trust Couldn't the AI store/do those things now? Why is an AI program controlled by an external company trusted to parse company code and logins?
- kozikow 4y agoNot just Kenya. I know of a few tasks in the insurance industry the "standard" is to send it to India. There are full factories of people doing specific tasks with insurance data, excels, submissions. It was always in our backlog to train some text proecssing model one day, but it always got postponed. Now I got it working with couple hours of prompt engineering. "Menial standard tasks dealing with messy data our humans outsourcing" jobs are going to be hit pretty hard.
- paulpauper 4y agoI had no idea it was Kenyans. I assumed it was low ranking professors, adjuncts, grads, etc. doing part time work or gig.
- mzalendo 4y agoI am a Kenyan and I know a couple of people engaged in "academic writing". They do it because they don't have any other better paying job opportunities. Most of the people I know doing this work are college educated but cannot find gainful employment. It is actually pretty interesting since they are a few Kenyans who own the platforms and have connections with college students in the US. They then sub-contract the actual work of writing the essays to other Kenyans and take a commission. Owning one of these platforms is lucrative since it scales pretty easily.
- jtode 4y agoI actually have a bit of experience doing this sort of thing, except in reverse - when I (white-presenting Canadian) was in Uni getting an English degree, I made small amounts of money rewriting papers for a guy from Sri Lanka. I cannot comment on the quality of his thought, but his writing was as bad as one would expect from a second language person who was studying a non-literature discipline; it was hard work and he had to be there the whole time to answer questions about what he meant by a sentence. I don't consider that work to be illegitimate; he gave me fully-written essays that I did not change the content of, only the grammar, so that his actual thought could reach his prof in a clear way. A discussion of privilege would mention that he was a rich kid whose father was, by his telling, a fairly important man in Sri Lanka. As such, I think anyone being salty towards this industry of people with essay skills writing essays for money is... wrongheaded, at best. Yes, the clickbaity title of the article emphasizes the way it is being abused by privileged people in the US, but as far as I'm concerned, it is just as possible that they are rewriting essays for people who are doing the work but struggle to compose the words. We all know that's not true in every case, and probably not true in most cases, but bottom line, This Is A Legitimate Industry, and writing off the bad effects of AI on said industry by assassinating the character of those who participate in it for survival is reprehensible.
- pharmakom 4y agoHave you considered that part of what was being assessed was communication ability? If the degree requires essay writing then I expect graduates to be competent at writing.
- User23 4y agoIndeed. I think it was Feynman who said something along the lines of "if you can't clearly explain something, you don't understand it." From the pragmatic philosophical distinction, I've acquired an appreciation for distinctness that's as great as mine for clarity[1]. Incidentally, I always find it surprising how readable Peirce's popular works are. [1] https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%201878%20Make%20Ideas%20Clear.pdf https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%20187...
- omgomgomgomg 4y agoLets see what the folks who say "this will create new,better jobs" have to say on how this will help the affected people.
- cameronfraser 4y agoLook at the history of articles from restofworld.org and you might be a little more skeptical about their claims: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=restofworld.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=restofworld.org A lot of sensationalized headlines with little substance
- jacknews 4y agoNext in News: AI takes the jobs of Nigerians who write emails requesting assistance to reclaim their temporarily inaccessible family fortune.
- c80e74f077 4y agoSo in a way, some Kenyans have taken the work of some other Kenyans, in what looks like a dystopia: “OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic” [0] [0] https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
- diebeforei485 4y agoGood. This job shouldn't have existed anyway.