I 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.
> 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.
Shouldn't they be employed at improving their own country, since they are this smart? Instead of gaining from corruption and fraud on another continent?
If the smartest young people in your country have to move abroad or work remotely for foreign companies in order to make the most of their skills, then your country and society is a total failure - ask me if you want, I'm from one of those places.
This only works if your country is self sufficient, from a resources standpoint and a IP standpoint. If you lack either, you participate in a global economy. And if you participate in a global economy, you need capital.
Say you’re the smart Kenyan who is willing to work. But there is no work in your country, or the only employment you can find is something that doesn’t use your intellect. You are that guy who can fix cars for a living, but there are no cars in the country. There are bicycles to be fixed, but they don’t pay enough to feed your family, or make progress.
You can choose to write essays, make money in dollars and afford a car. You can spend money in the local economy so that others can afford education, grow themselves and afford a car. Eventually you can create your own business locally to fix the cars. Or even better if you manage to make a lot of money, you can build a business that allows others to build their own business.
Or you could continue fixing bicycles, make no money and constantly worry about survival, and never do anything more than fixing bicycles.
And this is how capital and modern economics works. I’m also from one of those places. :)
Great counterpoint. Though I fear there is a moral hazard if ones wellbeing depends upon corruption, even far away. Corruption undercuts a stable and healthy society. Taken too far the rule of law becomes weakened, and that doesn't generally end well.
Maybe instead of fixing bicycles or facilitating scams they could just do honest remote work for richer societies?
> I fear there is a moral hazard if ones wellbeing depends upon corruption, even far away.
I don't see it that way. There's no moral hazard on the Kenyan side (they aren't the ones submitting work as their own). The same way a gun or car manufacturer isn't and shouldn't be liable for the criminal use of his product.
I could go on one of these market places and hire one of these Kenyan writer for completely legitimate reasons.
Re: moral hazzard, it seems odd to me that the US college kids use this service without a second thought. I'm old (50's) and we thought having someone type (typewriter era) your essay after you hand wrote it was dishonest. :-) The only situation I can think of where I might have cheated without feeling bad was maybe using a calculator on math homework where it was forbidden?
Well I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong for people in less developed countries to work for more developed countries. Even idealistically, the best state might be working for the first world to gain resources to send to the home country as it bootstraps itself into higher prosperity. The unfortunate fact is that highly educated people need infrastructure and stability to support that education, and therefore can gain many more resources working for developed countries than they can for their own. There just isn’t enough opportunity for education to push things forward without the infrastructure behind it.
Of course, yeah, relying on corruption and fraud from another continent to try and make a living you can’t make in your own country is a problem. When the issue is that local corruption is not just having them work for more developed countries, but having them abandon their home countries entirely, yeah that’s a big problem. But I don’t think there’s a problem with having people work remotely for foreign companies while their own country isn’t yet able to properly utilize their own skills yet.
The resources are already in their home country from the beginning. Then the local elite sell those resources to foreigners and leave their countrymen being poor. Since poor isn't stupid, those countrymen learn to write essays since learning is free. Then they work for foreigners to get some money, so they can buy resources. It's a circle of stupidity.
Everything in life is step by step. I completely understand those who emigrate or work for foreign companies instead of working on improving their country - I had to do that myself after fighting for many years. Nobody can be so patriotic that they throw their life away in that manner. What I don't understand is how the rulers can decide to continue on this road to ruin.
It's a lost opportunity and productivity loss. If the Kenyan writer was employed doing something that has a purpose, economic wealth would increase. Instead he/she is employed with helping incompetent people scam their way into jobs and positions where they will damage productivity.
However the capitalist system is one in which you should be rewarded for outsourcing something you cannot do or cannot do inexpensively yourself. Organization and correct market theories are what's rewarded* in capitalism. Especially in business schools we should be focused on making people who have those skills and rewarding them for successfully doing it. IMO the real distortion is in overvaluing those who have a degree, many of which only proves they can show up on time, consistently, and do as their told.
* (amongst other negative forms like rent seeking etc I'm talking about the positive case here)
>Shouldn't they be employed at improving their own country, since they are this smart? Instead of gaining from corruption and fraud on another continent?
Causing political change is hard, and a different skill. You might as well as Silicon Valley engineers why they're not improving American policy instead of making advertisers slightly better at getting clicks.
Yet many people throughout the world have improved their countries massively and in short time. Note that I'm not saying these writers should make political change in Kenya - I'm saying that the people in power there should get their heads out of their asses and understand that they have to give better opportunities to skilled locals so that they don't waste their productivity by writing college essays for foreigners.
> Instead of gaining from corruption and fraud on another continent?
it's not corrupt nor fraud from the point of view of the kenyans. They are merely doing a transaction with a foreigner. As far as the kenyans are concerned, it's the foreigner who is defrauding the university for plagerism and cheating.
“ Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you—the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary.”
Can'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?
It is very patronizing to think that these Kenyans have those kinds of opportunities, and have foolishly traded them in for a job writing essays. This is the best opportunity available to them at this time, and it is being taken away from them. If you think there were better opportunities they missed, then you are implicitly saying that they don't know what is best for themselves.
Having said all of that, let's not overstate the difficulty of writing college level essays, especially essays that are good enough for someone who isn't able to write such essays themselves.
> This is the best opportunity available to them at this time, and it is being taken away from them. If you think there were better opportunities they missed, then you are implicitly saying that they don't know what is best for themselves.
But the opportunities in Kenya weren't taken from them? That's what the poster is trying to explain: A country should make sure their brightest are gainfully employed and compensated. That's how you build a better nation.
That's a very faulty understanding of economics and labour. Wealth is created by man interacting with nature. Most nations in the history of the world created their wealth without being dependent on foreign money. Of course there are endless opportunities in Kenya, just as in other countries. The limiting factors are political and/or cultural. If some of the most barren countries in the world could spawn rich nations, what's lacking in Kenya?
This depends solely on what you're defining as an opportunity. Are the job positions there today? I.e., the "opportunity" that's an alternative to writing essays for foreign nations? Not enough of them. Could they be after a long cascade of primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary development? Yes. But they aren't there today. That's the key thing. People need to put food on the table today.
That is not what they are saying. They are saying that for the economy of Kenyan as a whole having a bunch of smart people writing essays for westerners does nothing to improve the local economy. If they are instead working to provide services or build infrastructure locally that will improve the economy for everybody there.
Can't you see how bad it for America - or anywhere - for people bright enough to understand stocks to be wasting their time selling stocks to rich people in Western countries
Economies are too complex to judge any one person’s choice of how they participate in them. If starting a business (or being a journalist or writing a novel) was a better idea, perhaps some of those Kenyans would have done that. But writing college essay brings (brought?) new money into Kenya that can be reinvested in new businesses, journalists, and novels. In the absence of non-corrupt foreign investment in Kenya I think this could be a big booster for their productive economy.
Meaningful work (generally) requires capital, and Kenya has very little capital. Capital has a compounding effect, so bringing in external capital now can pay dividends later.
>Can'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?
OR is it because this phenomenon is proof that the ability to write winning college degree level essays and dissertations and the accumulation of a industrial scale workforce of talent able to create such works over multiple sophisticated subject areas and subjects, has no benefits for a actual economy and can only persist as a activity if supported by a highly distorted systematic foreign reward arbitrage?
The reality is that in most developing countries, the more you can “hide” your work from the government, the better. People are drawn to online work because the government doesn’t really understand it nor does it have a clear framework for regulating it. This means you can keep working without some government official asking for bribes and bureaucratic paperwork.
It's bold to assume that a significant number of them even have an interest in writing novels, are capable of writing fiction with ideas that are original enough to bring them a decent income or publishing deal. How often does that actually happen in the USA? Almost never. It's a dream that can't be reached.
Equally, how many journalists does a country need? Not everybody can be a novelist. Not everybody can be a journalist.
At least you admit that essays are bullshit work; they don't actually assess an individual whatsoever if they can be outsourced, and are thus not fit for purpose of assessing someone.
Came here to say this. Why are we worried about Kenya when we are cheating ourselves? The society that suffers when American students simultaneously defraud American universities, devalue American degrees, and cheat their own education — is America
It’s more complicated though, because many universities are defrauding the students as well with overpriced tuition and degrees with limited value. Basically, it is a circle of fraud with the Kenyans, in this case, selling the shovels to the suckers.
I don't understand this argument. The Kenyan is exporting essays to the United States. Would you also call it bad for Kenya if she were building cars for export to the United States? What's the difference? And an American who exports software or cars to Kenya—is this bad for the United States? I don't understand why.
I’m pretty worried about India. Pretty much all of our recent prosperity can be attributed to the tech sector. The bulk of this tech sector is outsourcing work, not high level architecture or design work.
I can imagine this entire sector being hollowed out completely within a few years, destroying the entire middle class.
India at least seems to be attempting to homegrow multiple industries that the West typically specializes in (eg. Cars, heavy industry, tech at the lower levels of the stack). A country of their size with all that going for it probably wont be entirely screwed. I say this as someone whos parents came from Pakistan, at least you got some things going for you. I worry about the future of Pakistan: seems less certain...
I think too many companies have too much invested in their India teams for it to only take a few years for the sector to wind down. Short of some sort of calamity making it impossible for other counties to keep working with them, I suspect it would be a transition more over decades than years. (Even if AI is a looming issue, the sort of companies large enough to outsource are also the companies that will take the longest to truly realize AIs potential in their own workflows)
I’ve also worked with enough extremely skilled people out of India who were involved in architecture and design work that I think all the skill needed is present in the country for their own tech sector to sustain itself eventually. Now if the government and societal norms will allow that to actually come to fruition…less sure on that.
The market will force their hand. If your competitor replaces its entire customer service with AI agents that talk like real people with an American accent (the tech is almost there) and reports lower costs and higher profits, you will have no choice but to follow along.
India’s tech sector is almost entirely dominated by low paid, low skilled tech labor. TCS and Infosys combined employ over a million people.
To give you an indication of the skill gap, a fresh college graduate who joins TCS usually gets $4,500-5,000 per year. Meanwhile a VC funded startup product company will usually pay $30-40,000 per year.
I really don’t see how these $5k/year employees aren’t replaced by AI agents.
i haven't seen it posted before, but i've noticed many (if not all) Checker's (Rally's for some) burger restaurants have automated drive-thru order taker. You speak what you want and can upgrade sizes and so on and I've never had it not get my order correct.
Newer versions with the ChatGPT-like AI is definitely closer than people think. and Customer Service jobs are a very large amount of employment here and overseas. Bad for lots of people.
Altman did say that customer service jobs will likely be the first casualty. Voice AI is already close to human-like.
Countries like Phillippines will suffer a lot. In India, the BPO industry alone employs over 4M people, and this is the first step towards middle-class for a lot of people. If this is taken away, I don't know what they will do.
> If there was other global knowledge work available to Kenyans I’m sure they’d take it.
I'm not sure the logic stands. Following the same logic, I can also argue that of course looting should not exist, but it does. Looter could've taken a decent job if they could find one. Plagiarism shouldn't exist, but it does. The cheating students could've avoid cheating if they could get higher scores so they can find a decent job. And on and on.
Writing an essay for someone else is cheating. It's still wrong. Just not as punishable as a crime. BTW, cheating in Keju (Chinese imperial examination) is a capitol crime, as it undermined the fairness of the system and the quality of the ruling class, and derived the chances of other poor candidates. Not that I think cheating is serious, mind you, just wanted to give perspective on how different cultures perceive cheating and the underlying rationales.
I wont go as far as to say its "Good" full stop, but Kenya (and other less developed nations, relative to US) have an opportunity to base their economy on the next thing, rather than incumbents which must unwind policy and allow long term investments to fall to unacceptable ROI (often bankruptcy) ...
Consider telephone and credit card networks. Some countries skipped straight to mobile/wireless telephony (with internet!) while the US had to make the "this region already is wired, why are we putting a cell tower there?" (this played out in the 90s). Similar has happened with creditcard terminals in USA, where other countries got better infrastructure faster because there wasnt a competing incumbent investment in place.
Those Nigerian Princes sure are clever bilking people out of their savings, we should think of the consequences of removing the income of such clever groups. Yes these are people but that way leads to rot lets not normalize it unnecessarily, MHO!!!
I am very worried about the potential impacts of AI across all societies. However, I think a reasonable argument can be made that providing all Kenyans access to the knowledge of ChatGPT could accelerate the nations development, rather than just eliminate all options. I’m not saying that is what will happen, but I am not sure AI futurists are lying to themselves. I don’t know how any side in this debate can be sure they are right. In fact, I think the best argument against the AI futurist argument is the wild uncertainty of what will happen and risks associated with that.
technology 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
Technology 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.
I 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.
> 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 hated tests like this... because I was a lazy kid who coasted through school and didn't understand why "simply understanding the material" was insufficient. In college (Cornell) the chaos continued, I got poor grades in calc because despite getting all the bonus questions right (which tested your understanding of the material), I couldn't finish the actual test in time because I hadn't done the problem-set homework (these problem sets took 6 hours to do btw... coming from a high school that only started challenging me towards the end, I was completely ill-equipped to handle that level of self-discipline).
Of course, in the working world, it turns out that persistence/commitment/self-discipline is the real payoff. I had to learn that the hard way later on.
Yeah, I failed calculus three times because I was working two jobs to support a failing business, and I just had no time to do the assignments. Finally I found a class that graded only on the tests and got my A.
I failed it twice: first because I got too cocky when the previous semester ended without incident. Second was due to the fact that I already had a part time job.
On the third attempt I had a different lecturer - an old guy who favoured attendance over anything else and gave the same problems each year. I knew most of the material already, so I got 80% out of that.
I learned nothing from that experience though and went on to fail 22 courses over the seven years I spent in college.
It was actually youth, arrogance and stupidity. The same things also kept me going.
After my junior year I found a job through a school friend whom I helped preparing for his exams and from that point on I started weighing whether on a given day I should go to lectures or make money. My family was in a precarious situation financially and I only needed two full days to finance repeating a course, so the choice was obvious at the time.
I almost dropped out after two semesters because I failed too many courses (four - two was the limit after the first year), but I talked the dean out of deciding to kick me out - we had that option back in the day.
I spent the remainder of my time on what you could consider a Performance Improvement Plan - took 14 courses for the third semester, failed three, but thanks to that I was just three short starting the fourth, which was acceptable.
Four years of winging it like that and after a total of five years(instead of the planned four) I had my Bachelor of Engineering degree.
In hindsight I should have not went to do a Master's Degree because I never finished my thesis due to not being satisfied with the scope(or the lack of it).
I'd suggest doing so. Also a sleep study to see if you have sleep apnea, because it also results in frequent job changes.
I unfortunately have both (although both are now being managed and my stability has hugely improved). There was a lot of drama before the diagnoses, and I'm still working through having taken it personally...
My high school physics professor gave us a choice: You can bring hand-written notes to a tougher exam, or no notes to an easier exam. I forget what we chose, but it opened my eyes to the difference between memorizing formulae and understanding how to use ‘em. I now have (I think) a solid grasp of basic physics.
Our chemistry professor had the opposite approach – memorize all the things and test that. I still don’t understand chemistry.
In college every professor encouraged bringing notes, textbooks, anything you need. The exam is there to test your understanding, not whether you can memorize a bunch of trivia.
The toughest exam I ever had was for the compilers class – 4 hours open internet do whatever you want as long as your compiler passes my unit tests. 2 questions: Add feature A and feature B to the compiler you built at tutorials this semester.
Yeah, 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.
Well, 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.
Next step is to go wheel of fortune style, and provide a standard cheat sheet with the finicky formulas, and then let the students at their own supplementary cheat sheet
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.
Yes, we can find creative in-class test methods immune to cheaters and GPTs. But if the skill you are testing has been commodified, the deeper problem is to justify learning it at all. Once you have the calculator, learning long division hardly matters. Most adults have forgotten the algorithm.
We're making the skill of writing, and much else, into a calculator.
But we don't know yet what the implications will be... the skill is writing is bound up with thinking and culture in ways long division is not.
In learning and practicing division, you gain an intuition about how numbers are composed. This is an intuition that is useful when you’re trying to figure out if you should pay for that 50 dollar item, or if 6 payments of 10 dollars is a reasonable deal. While you could always bring out your calculator every time you make a decision, most people don’t and rely primarily on quick intuition instead.
This is more important than ever in the world of chat GPT. When you’re dealing with something that can quickly generate something that sounds convincing regardless of truth value, you need that quick intuition to keep up. So the question is, if you’re a chemistry major, how do you gain that intuition? It’s possible that generating lots of data from GPT and just checking it for truth value more painstakingly before handing it in is sufficient to eventually learn. But it’s also possible that you do need to personally learn the fundamentals by working through problems if you want to eventually gain the intuitions a chemistry major needs to have. While a deeper problem exists in the commodification…it’s hard to say how much that deeper problem affects the ideal way to teach people to be skilled in a subject.
One Intro to Physics (for majors and engineering) professor was the toughest and reveled in it. The class, in general, was a weeder class, so we all knew going in that it was meant to be overly hard.
The final though. My lord. It was hard, yes, but he put a little extra bit of psychological torture into it: It was a 'choose your grade' final.
In that, he had written four separate final exams. One was a D, one was a C, one was a B, and one was an A. You had to choose which final to take, and that would be the grade you got for the exam, providing that you passed that test. If you didn't pass you got an F. You could only choose one exam to take, no trying to finish the D quickly and then move up to a B.
I think only one person had the chutzpah to take the A level test. Everyone else struggled along with the Bs and Cs. Which, I unfortunately have to remember, were very difficult themselves.
Education really serves as a dual purpose in our society of both providing knowledge and demonstrating in a actionable way (i.e. someone will hire you based on it) that you know something.
But most of what you need to prove is not something you actually use in your job. A A in compilers will help you get a job as it makes you seem smart, but very few developers will ever write one. So in that case, the A in itself is the goal.
What do you propose? I read your comment as we shouldn't verify knowledge and just let doctors go yolo on their patients, which I assume isn't what you intended.
Not to be coy, my point is that education is one thing, and contests to see who gets the cherry positions in society are another, and when you combine them you get cheating. Which, of course, undermines the "verify knowledge" function of the tests in the first place, eh?
In my domain (computer programming) I know enough and have enough experience that I can gauge the skill and knowledge of my peers (and they mine.) That is how I get jobs. I go in and talk to the other programmers, and I can demonstrate that I'm "the real deal".
In re: "just [letting] doctors go yolo on their patients" I don't want to get into a long thing here, but I will mention that a strong argument could be made that the current system is not very good at getting positive outcomes. What I mean is, doctors and hospitals kill a lot of people. In other words, the existing systems to train and employ doctors are far from perfect.
(Not to put too fine a point on it, the way to find good doctors is to ask other doctors whom they would let doctor them, ya feel me?)
- - - -
edit: I realized I didn't answer your question.
What I propose is that we throw out the whole obviously-broken academic system.
I propose that people go to colleges and schools to learn, at any age, at any time, and they don't get grades or degrees or anything.
You get to be a doctor or architect or whatever by demonstrating to other people who know that you too know, rather than "earning" a proxy (degree or whatever) that can be faked.
If human life were simple enough that it could be covered by a system of tests and grades we wouldn't have these huge brains on the ends of our spines, eh?
I didn't explain my meaning well enough, I apologize.
I mean a scenario where the candidate for doctor (or whatever) talks to half a dozen or a dozen doctors who then say "yay" or "nay" and if all of them say "yay" they are a doctor but if any of them say "nay" then they are not (although this doesn't mean that they can never become doctors later, they just have to address the failings first that led to the reviewing doctors to decline to admit them to their ranks.)
It's about humans communicating with other humans in a way that is extremely difficult to fake, as opposed to whatever testing system we're using now (that people cheat at) that produces (unreliable) proxies for actual domain knowledge.
If you just want to learn tests are unnecessary.
If you want to become a doctor the only distinction should be that other doctors must be willing to submit themselves to your care.
(This might sound crazy, but the person who is the greatest healer I've ever met IRL is not a doctor and would be laughed at by most of them, yet he can effect miraculous cures of major diseases, among other things. His art is completely off the radar of modern medicine.)
I 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.
Have 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.
Indeed. 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.
He was able to explain the concepts to me with his words just fine, he just wasn't able to write them down too well. Again, I did not correct his work, I was an English student and knew sfa about his work. But I transliterated his Bad English explanations into Good English explanations and he got excellent grades on his essays, so it seems to me he was very competent.
I'm pretty sure there's a critical mass of famous science dudes who relied on someone else to turn their scribble into coherent writing. No difference.
It's got to be really tough for a non-native speaker to become a good writer in another language. It's possible that they were quite a good writer in Tamil, just not in English.
> 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.
That's called tutoring.
Not only is it legal, but a lot of institutions encourage it and even run official services to offer it. Language proficiency for foreign students is often a pretty big barrier to their success. Your student learned from you, and I'm sure he wasn't ashamed back home to tell his parents that he hired a tutor to sharpen his skills.
What these people are doing is different, they are sending in the assignment and expecting a completed paper at the end. They may or may not use it to further their understanding or skills, but they will definitely submit it as their own.
Look white, grew up white, not completely white in actual fact. I was mainly establishing my general whiteness of character and persona, but being accurate.
edit: I describe myself as straight-presenting for the same reasons.
I see. I was wondering if this was the new "culturally accepted term" in Canada r something.
Side question: Is race as present over there in politics as it is here in the US? I remember reading about the country now having racial quotas for TV guests appearances and university research grants.
There is (or maybe now "was") a pretty big industry of Americans writing things for foreign students who don't write English fluently. College application essays, homework assignments, even academic publications. Mostly rich kids from China. My friend used to brag about the time his application essay got a kid who barely spoke English into an Ivy League school lol.
Putting aside for a minute that most colleges today are just super expensive diploma mills with a fun social scene. The theory behind grading an essay is that you’re assessing not just the idea but also the ability of the writer to communicate that idea. By forcing people to work on how they communicate effectively you get better communication, which in theory leads to a more peaceful world.
At my most cynical, my response to this is dripping with acidic sarcasm towards the idea that Kenyans are somehow bringing corruption into our clean, meritocratic university system.
I 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.
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.
> 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.)
I 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.
Charging 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.
It 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.
To 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?
Essays 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.
I 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.
Is 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.
The problem is how those essays are graded. In some cases the teacher just count the number of pages and skim the text.
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.
Writing essays is certainly more useful if there's helpful feedback given, but the exercise is useful in and of itself. I don't think the fact the bad teachers exist is "the problem".
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.
It 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 =[
This is actually an extremely low bar, and it's ironic, given your username. Thirty years ago students would plagiarize material and then use semi-automated means to avoid the appearance of copying. They'd have a list of common replacements they'd apply to a block of text after copying it (which in those days they'd have typed in by hand from a printed source).
Replacing existing text and having it remain coherent is nowhere near the difficulty of creating it from nothing. It is pretty funny that even in this strawman argument you felt the need to write "semi-automated."
> 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.
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."
I 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.
Kenyans 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.
This 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
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.
This 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.
This 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.
Not 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.
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.
I 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.)
I'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.
It 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.
Yes! However, I assume web-search wont disappear and perhaps AI can handle some sort of filtering (like maybe AI-enhanced Spam filtering?).
Just guessing.
For example, despite unsubscribing from emails daily and constantly junking, I still get a ton of spam. I assume simply telling a model "never show me a marketing e-mail again" probably works pretty well.
> Soon all that content will be replaced by GPT output, not my doing, but it's happening.
Well, GPT has to learn on something. Right now it's just a language model. It won't get better unless people keep writing these "non-native-english-speaker content".
And maybe we read different things, but I disagree - a lot of my problems were solved by niche non-native-english-speaker bloggers posting about their problems and original research that went into solving them.
Well, 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.
if 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
More 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.
These 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.
For 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.
Look 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 A lot of sensationalized headlines with little substance
So 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]
This 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.
Per 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.
Not exactly sure it's great for kenya. I made good pocket money, better than my 8 hour internship solving CS assignments. That was not a career but good pocket money.
I would just sit idle if I were not solving assignments.
if 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.
I saw rampant cheating in an engineering program - there was zero busy work, homework problems were really more like a good starting place, and people still cheated.
Also - weird thing to say about kenyans. The people under discussion specifically make their living by researching and writing academic essays, I think the natural assumption is that they'd be pretty sharp. No one wants to pay for Cs and Ds.
My experience in college was that plenty of students have priorities of just passing without having to do the work, and would pay for C’s in required courses they don’t think are important while partying or working a part time job.
I'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.
Although there are specific, genuine concerns mixed into that anti-intellectualism sometimes: e.g. regarding political indoctrination through education.
The political slant in those EXAM QUESTIONS appears completely absurd to me-- its basically on a "full points only if you call the californians hypocrites"-level (and thats not even hyperbole), and if that is what an exam is allowed to look like I don't even want to know how much overt preaching happens in the lectures.
An opinionated professor is fine, possibly entertaining even, and being exposed to conflicting viewpoints is valuable in itself, but THAT went WAY beyound any reasonable bounds.
Yeah that midterm grading system was basically "you get an A if you agree with my political opinions, and you fail if you disagree". He's not even teaching at a tiny liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere, this is at George Mason University, a highly regarded research university.
It's fine if he explains his viewpoints in lecture occasionally, but not if passing a class is dependent on agreeing with the professor on everything. If that were the case, most economists would fail his midterm.
I don't think so (I asked in the comments and from the responses I got can only conclude that this is NOT the norm).
But the fact that the professor himself has no problem sharing this online is concerning itself.
This should, in my opinion, appear immediately and obviously unethical to everyone involved, even if you share the professors political outlook completely...
Everybody has their reasons about whats wrong about formal education - some are better and some are way too individual, yet lets do not act as if formal edu was something flawless
There’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.
The expectation of universal results has problems, but universal education is one of the most crucial cornerstones of developed society. Culture and innovation blossom from it like flowers in rich fertile soil. There's a reason humans have fought (sometimes literally) for access to an education.
Culture and innovation blossom from human knowledge, not formal state-mandated education systems. Today, as throughout history, most "culture and innovation" (as measured by inventions, companies, researchers, art, philosophy, etc.) spring from men and women who break ties with their "educations" and instead strike out on their own in the search of truth.
We both agree that a literate and highly knowledgeable citizenry is paramount to the success of society, but the current western education model is failing to produce that citizenry. This failure is in part because professional educators remain unaware that universal education did not create developed societies, rather developed societies created universal education.
Information alone is insufficient to instill individuals with the character necessary to create great societies. The citizenry must already be strong-willed and self-determined for education to successfully add serious value to their lives. Those are the people who fight for their education. Many students today instead fight to avoid learning anything, because the system they're trapped inside has become so odious and hampered by redundancy, inefficiency, and a total lack of humanity.
I went to hippie boarding school where I had no science and one math class between the ages of 11 and 18. Most of my time was spent doing other stuff. Now I have a PhD in physics and work as a research scientist. School is a joke and prepares you for nothing. Although I suppose you could say I was prepared for the path I wanted. Perhaps the deeper take away is that educational preparation is much more complex then simply exposing young people to content they will learn more deeply later. Who knows.
If anything, LLMs showed that you don’t need ability to reason to perform many jobs, like content writing. College assays are probably another good example.
I can offer a solution though. Don’t create that many for-profit institutions that teach useless degrees. Don’t put students in debt for getting useless degrees that they cheat their way though. Done.
It's not a solution because many people will disagree with the premise.
Just because LLM can generate text doesn't mean generating text is useless. Namely, it helps thinking.
Do you also believe humans have to understand fractions because computers can do them? Genuine question; a lot of people think like that.
EDIT: Also, no one is putting anyone in debt. People are free to choose what they want to do. Don't wanna study, just don't. Easy. No, what's actually happening is that individually are making dumb decisions out of their own free will.
> Those are bound to have dumb assignments that even an LLM can complete.
Right, lets stop teaching children how to sum.
I wonder if you've ever learned anything complex in your entire life. Probably not. But the rest of us now that training of any kind starts simple and builds from there.
I think most of the University could probably be replaced by short courses and long apprenticeships. At least in stem. This would likely reduce the amount of people who could go to universities.
An 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.
In the authors defense, I read it as referring to Kenyans because of the nature of the article which talks about them, not specifically about Kenyans not having anything interesting to write about or the skills to do so (having spend a good amount of time in Nairobi I know this is not the case!)
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.