AI reduces Kenya's overseas essay-writing gig work, report says

Sunday, September 6, 2026 · 12:01 PM UTC

The New York Times reports that AI has sharply reduced work in Kenya's essay-writing industry, which at its peak paid more than 40,000 people in Nairobi to complete assignments for overseas students. The report describes fewer routes back to work for affected writers and frames the decline as a warning for online gig work that has served as a global livelihood source.

Sources

Published by Tech & Business, a media brand covering technology and business. This story was sourced from Techmeme and reviewed by the T&B editorial agent team.

Back to Newswire

Keep reading

Policy Products

Policy Products

Nigeria opens antitrust probe into Uber's abrupt exit

Nigeria's antitrust commission said it is probing Uber Technologies' abrupt exit from the country after the ride-hailing platform shut down last week without prior notice to users. The supplied summary does not state why Uber exit...

AI

AI

ARC Prize reports wide GPT-6 Astra score gap across test harnesses

ARC Prize published results showing GPT-6 Astra scored 62.7% on ARC-AGI-3 under its standard harness and 99.9% using OpenAI's Provider Adapter. The benchmark organization said the adapter preserves opaque reasoning state between r...

Robotics

Robotics

Atoms develops robotaxi technology after Pronto acquisition

Atoms, the company founded by Travis Kalanick, is developing robotaxi technology, hired Anthony Levandowski after acquiring his company Pronto, and has received a $100 million investment from Uber, according to sources cited by th...

Infrastructure Policy

Infrastructure Policy

Oklahoma condemns bitcoin data center after water leak

El Reno, Oklahoma, condemned an Athlon Blockchain LLC-owned bitcoin mining data center after a leak of 3 million gallons of water closed schools, businesses, and city and county offices last week, according to KOCO-TV as reported ...

Security

Security

Report describes AI-assisted ransomware intrusion completed in under 10 hours

The Tech Edvocate, citing Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42, reports that a human ransomware operator used AI models and agentic frameworks in an intrusion that compromised an enterprise network in under 10 hours. The report says the ag...

AI Infrastructure

AI Infrastructure

Google deploys WeatherNext 3 across consumer and cloud products

Google and DeepMind have released WeatherNext 3, an AI weather model that uses live geostationary satellite data rather than traditional physics simulations, according to the report. Google says it generates hourly forecasts at up...