Just when you thought that the legacy media couldn't get any dumber, something new sets its thumb on the dumb end of the scale. This time it's the New York Times, once called the "Newspaper of Record," now more or less a fish-wrapper. In its latest episode of dumb takes, the NYT published a report from Kenya, bemoaning the fact the Kenyan workers who have been helping American college students cheat by writing essays for them, are now losing those jobs because it's faster and easier for American students to cheat using artificial intelligence (AI).
Teresios Bundi once symbolized the strange, life-changing opportunities the internet provided.
Hailing from a farming village in Kenya, Mr. Bundi moved to the capital, Nairobi, in 2011 to be the first in his family to attend university. There, a friend suggested he try a new online job: writing essays for cheating overseas college students.
His first assignment was a two-page essay on the health benefits of the Garcinia cambogia. It was a fruit he had never heard of, and an essay written for a student he didn’t know anything about. He earned $7 for three hours of work.
“That was a lifeline for me, I needed the money,” Mr. Bundi, now 34, said in an interview in Nairobi. He added: “I could not sleep that night. I was ready to burn the midnight oil.”
Gosh, what pride he must have taken in his work, helping college students in the United States cheat on their homework. What value he produced!
But all good frauds must come to an end.
Then A.I arrived, and the good times ended.
In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. At colleges worldwide, students made a simple calculation that has become more pronounced today: Why pay a freelancer in Kenya when ChatGPT could do the job?
Essay work began to thin. Rates fell, and assignments dwindled. Before long, the industry shrank to almost nothing. “I never would have expected A.I. could do this,” Mr. Bundi said.
Good. Helping college kids in the United States to cheat isn't something one should be proud of. Now, at least, with them using AI, these young skulls full of mush aren't involving anyone else directly in its cheating.
Back in the day, of course (he wrote, invoking shouts of "get off my lawn"), none of this was possible. Oh, some upperclassmen would write a quick paper for you in return for some compensation. In my own college days I dimly remember a case of beer being the going rate, although I never did that myself, on either side of the transaction. But now? Now a college student can just have a robot brain cheat for him. You don't even have to involve a Kenyan cheating service anymore, and the New York Times takes a tone very sympathetic to the cheaters who are helping students cheat.
For Mr. Bundi, the transition has been difficult. He said he missed the intellectual wrestling match of learning new subjects and writing under a tight deadline, as well as working with some students from when they were freshmen through graduate school.
“It was like getting a parallel education,” he said.
Next time, Mr. Bundi, try honest work. There are efforts in Kenya to help the cheaters transition to honorable work. Something that produces value.
And as for these young skulls full of mush who are using AI to generate their assigned work - cheating, in other words - I have it on good authority that there are programs now that detect AI-generated prose with remarkable accuracy. I would love to see American academia adopt the standard that any student who is found to be using AI to generate their schoolwork should be expelled forthwith; but, sadly, we know that American higher education is no longer a bastion of educational ethics and codes.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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