> 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.
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.)