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.
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.
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.)
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.
Does anyone know what fraction of Kenyans have incomes of at least 1000 USD/month?
Competing with GPT4 on price for boilerplate essay is just pointless.
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.
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.
One of my friends once submitted an essay where the introduction and the conclusions were coherent, but all the text in the middle was just unrelated garbage. It's an extreme case, but in many cases if the extremes and the subtitles are fine, the quality of the middle is not so important.
(BTW, it's "poring" not "pouring".)
I wonder how easy it is now for Western high school teachers to outsource things like lesson planning or grading tests to lower-cost countries? Startup idea: build a marketplace like that. There has to be a market for it.
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.
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."