Source: NYT > Business (paywall)
What was a viable $5-50 per essay income stream for thousands of Kenyan writers has evaporated as ChatGPT and similar tools eliminated the arbitrage that made outsourced academic writing profitable for Western students. AI destroyed a specific labor market faster than alternative work emerged. The essay mills' collapse exposes how gig economy platforms create dependency on tasks with zero switching costs for clients once technology improves. Any gig work priced on geographic wage gaps is vulnerable to automation, a risk that matters for the 1.3 billion people in low-income countries currently building livelihoods on such work.