U.S. students switch to ChatGPT for writing assignments

Collins is a freelance writer who has been earning money by writing assignments for American students for the past nine years. He lives in Kenya and is involved in what locals call "academic writing," or "essay ghostwriting. His assignments range from college papers on topics such as psychology, sociology and economics.

At times, he was even authorized to visit university portals directly, submit tests and assignments as a student, participate in group discussions and communicate with professors, according to a report in the foreign press cited by Netflix. By 2022, he was earning between $900 and $1,200 a month from this work.

Recently, however, his earnings have dropped to $500 to $800 per month, which Collins attributes to the rapid rise of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools.

At this time last year, I was getting an average of 50 to 70 assignments at a time, including shorter discussions of about 150 words each that didn't require much research," Collins says. Now, on average, I'm getting just over 30 to 40 assignments."

In January 2023, the online learning platform Study conducted a survey covering more than 1,000 U.S. students and more than 100 educators. The survey results showed that more than 89 percent of students said they had used ChatGPT to help with homework assignments. Nearly half of students admitted to using ChatGPT on a home exam or quiz, 53 percent used it to write an essay, and 22 percent used it for an overview.

Collins is now very concerned that the rise of artificial intelligence could significantly reduce students' reliance on "essay writers" like him in the long run, affecting their income. In the meantime, he now also relies on ChatGPT to generate content that he had previously outsourced to other writers.