Episode Transcript
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Morgan Sung: Imagine you’re a college student. The end of the semester is just around the corner. It’s the middle of finals week and you have to study for an exam, finish a presentation and turn in a research paper all within the next 12 hours. Unfortunately, you’ve been procrastinating and you only have time to finish two of those three things. You could use a tool like Chat GPT, but you don’t wanna get caught using AI. So you open a new tab.
In the search bar, you type, essay… writer… fast. Enter. Dozens of results pop up. Websites with generic-sounding names, but sleek, friendly designs. They promise high-quality, custom essays delivered in days, or even hours. All you have to do is run through a few drop-down menus and pick what you need, and then enter your credit card number. You’ve just stepped into an industry known as “contract cheating,” better known as essay mills.
It’s the subject of a new documentary, The Shadow Scholars, which just had its North American premiere at Tribeca Film Festival.
The Shadow Scholars Trailer: We’ve all grown up being told that education empowers us. And if you study at school, then you’re going to get the rewards. I’m going to shine a light on the world’s billion-dollar secret.
Morgan Sung: It looks at who the people are on the other side of that screen.
Patricia Kingori: One day I was invited to go along to a lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute and they were talking about these online laborers. And then they started talking about different parts of the world and where different people in different parts of the worlds use the internet for work.
Morgan Sung: This is Patricia Kingori, a Kenyan-born UK-based sociologist. In 2021, she became the youngest Black professor at the University of Oxford. She’s also one of the main subjects of the film.
Patricia Kingori: So then they described Kenya and said, you know, there is this writing and translation work, which is a kind of euphemism for the fake essay industry. And I just became really interested in, well, who are these people?
Morgan Sung: This topic is personal for Patricia.
Patricia Kingori: I think if you have had your thesis stolen, as I have had the ideas from my thesis stolen, you immediately start to believe that an industry where people do benefit from the intellect of others exists, right? I think really allowed me to start from a presumption of the fact that they exist rather than I think where many people have not had this experience might start, which is, well, how can that be?
Morgan Sung: Just after attending the lecture, Patricia caught up with filmmaker Eloise King, who ended up directing the documentary. They had known each other for years, and Patricia casually mentioned the so-called fake essay industry.
Eloise King: My immediate reaction was how do real people write fake essays? And I was immediately obsessed. I think one of the things that we share is a kind of an inquisitiveness that goes really deep once it’s sort of implanted.
Morgan Sung: And so, Eloise and Patricia, dug deeper. What they found was a booming, but mostly hidden industry of writers centered in Kenya, who are paid to produce academic work for others. Patricia wrote about it in 2021 in the Journal of African Culture Studies. The name “shadow scholars” comes from author Dave Tomar, who wrote about his own experience as an academic ghostwriter in his 2012 memoir.
The film, “The Shadow Scholars”, is less about the ethics of cheating and more about the unseen labor involved. The documentary focuses on the shadow scholars based in Kenya, which is a major hub for the fake essay industry. They’re often hired by students in the US, the UK, and Australia. Here’s Patricia in the film.
Patricia Kingori: So of all of the online labor work that’s going on in Kenya, 72% of that…
Professor Vili Lehdonvirta: Is engaged in writing and translation work. Actually, we know it’s just writing essays for students in global North universities.
Eloise King: And so, Patricia presenting these findings really turned on a light for me because what we had was this really difficult to prove, you know, lived experience of like global majority but like marginalized communities within education. And so I just became really excited with the idea that we could ask more questions and find out if this flow of information was really kind of fueling institutions around the world.
Morgan Sung: And it’s not just undergrad essays. Shadow scholars are also hired to write entire PhD dissertations. They do all of the work, but someone else gets the credit, the qualifications, and eventually the jobs. The shadow scholars, meanwhile, aren’t afforded the same opportunities. So who are these shadow scholars? How does this exchange work? And what is the generative AI boom doing to this industry that relies on human intellectual labor?
This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.
We sat down with Patricia and Eloise to learn about how this industry works and shine some light on the people at the center of it.
Time for a new tab. Who are the shadow scholars?
Even the word fake essay, like that’s such a loaded phrase where, you know, the premise may be fake, but the person writing it is real, the content is real, it is a real academic work. Why frame this as shadow scholars?
Patricia Kingori: Think it really forces us to think about something that we often don’t think about. So in relation to Africa, the word shadow is the most common analogy that’s used to describe Africa, “in the shadow of”, “the shadows of this.” It’s always in the shadows. And I think that I became really interested in this concept of the shadow, because in Swahili there is no word for shadow is something that doesn’t exist.
So from the moment you say that something is a shadow, basically what you’re saying is that it doesn’t exist in the world. And as the writers in Kenya themselves do, you could say it’s a support agency. You could use any number of different words for it, but to use it and to say that they’re shadow scholars, I think is something that’s forcing us to say, are these people real? Are they visible from whose perspective? And use the words to really question their position in the world and how they want to be seen in the world.
Morgan Sung: Here’s Eloise again.
Eloise King: You just look at what media are saying about these people and how they’re discussing it and how it’s being discussed in the mainstream, right? And, you know, they’re being called these cancers that are brick by brick, breaking down um the sort of legitimacy of education. Like, the language is so xenophobic. Their identity was being hijacked and used in these really derogatory terms. And so that was something as well that really mindful throughout, like, how do we engage with them directly and have this story told from their perspective, but also like very much more on their terms.
Morgan Sung: A review of studies found that nearly 16% of students admitted to contract cheating between 2014 and 2018. Extrapolated globally, that’s over 30 million students. The stats that we do have about contract cheating are likely skewed because they rely on students to self-report on their own cheating habits.
Altogether, Eloise said it’s a $15 billion industry. There are about 40,000 writers just in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. That number fluctuates based on demand. Patricia said that during the end of the semester, when students are scrambling to turn in work, the number of writers might double. And is this an industry concentrated in Kenya, is it unique to Kenya, or does it manifest elsewhere in the Global South?
Eloise King: Yeah it definitely does. When we talk to other academics who are looking into this, Dr Thomas Lancaster, who appears in the film, he specifically said there isn’t a country or university in the world where we don’t think that this is going on. It just so happens that Kenya is the hot spot, the global hot spot, where the greatest number of people are doing this work.
Morgan Sung: Kenya is a hotspot, because it’s an English speaking country with a strong education system and a high adult literacy rate. But at the same time, there aren’t many career opportunities for young people.
Patricia Kingori: I think it’s really worth saying that this industry has always existed. It’s actually nothing new insofar as there has always been people who have benefited from having other people write their work and do their work for them. What’s new now is the scale of the industry and the geography of the industry.
But for example, we know that increasingly we’re getting so many of these kind of hidden figures stories. We’re hearing about, you know, women, we’re hearing about African-American, we’re hearing about gay and queer people who have propped up other people who’ve gone on to claim qualifications or claim inventions on their behalf because they were marginalized in history. What’s happened is as this has become harder and harder to actually do without scrutiny in the Global North, it’s shifted to locations that have been made invisible and that we were all invested in making this place as invisible, and also, because of technology, we can have this happen on a scale it’s never happened before.
Morgan Sung: Ok. Let’s recap how this process works from students’ perspectives. A lot of these essay writing services advertise all over Instagram and TikTok.
Influencer: I actually paid someone, I paid three people to write my essays.
Morgan Sung: Or they have excellent SEO. So if you Google “write a paper fast”, they’ll be at the very top of your results.
Influencer 2: One of the fastest ways to meet your essay deadline while using a paper writing service is to choose one that offers a quick turnaround time.
Morgan Sung: Once you settle on a site, you pick your subject and the grade you want and a page count. These sites might charge something like $8 per page, but charge more for more specialized topics like engineering or medicine. An undergrad literature essay, for example, will be significantly cheaper than a doctorate-level thesis. When you put your order in, you set a deadline, which could be anything from six months to six hours. For the shadow scholars in Kenya, the writers behind these papers, it’s all about response time.
Patricia Kingori: The thing that really fascinated me about the writers were there was a level of psychology that was involved actually. Um, you know, they would often set their alarms and their clocks to be up at certain times because they knew that’s when students would start to panic, right?
So they know that, you know, in the UK, if I have a deadline for tomorrow, I might maybe have a look at it, but by about 10 o’clock, I’m starting to get tired. I know I’m not going to get this thing done. That’s when I’m starting to look online for help. So they know, okay, around, you know, one o’clock, two o’ clock in the morning Kenya time, I need to be up because that’s when somebody’s gonna be jumping in online to get help.
Morgan Sung: Some of the students who hire these services are very privileged. They’re even wealthy enough to hire shadow scholars for every university assignment up until graduation. And they develop relationships with the writers too. One of the Kenyan writers profiled in the documentary, Chege, had worked for the same student for years and through that was able to buy a car and pay for his sister to attend university. These dynamics are complex.
Patricia Kingori: I think it’s really easy to imagine a world where the writers are quite derogatory about the students or they think badly of them or they speak about them in negative terms. I think one of the things that was really surprising for me was how much empathy sometimes they had with the students right and how they really genuinely saw themselves as trying to help these students.
And I think their empathy was really important in terms of how we then managed the story because it’s really easy to paint a picture of good guys and bad guys and those guys are terrible and these guys are great, but actually we needed a much more nuanced story about the students themselves as people who we wouldn’t necessarily use the word victims, but certainly weren’t necessarily always winning in this system.
Morgan Sung: The students hiring these writers have to have a certain level of access to resources to be able to do it at all. But the majority of them are not that rich. They’ll do most of their semester’s work by themselves and will hire shadow scholars as a last resort. Here’s Eloise again.
Eloise King: So there’s a student who appears in the film called Kate, who talks about just how incredibly competitive it is at university. And once you understand that everyone’s cheating, it becomes almost like a zero sum game where if you aren’t cheating, then are you gonna be left behind if you aren’t getting someone else to do the work for you.
Morgan Sung: The film shows Kate, overwhelmed, turning to an essay writing agency. But she doesn’t have the $300 to pay for her final paper. So she turns to the internet.
Eloise King: Everyone is so entwined by technology. Like we had Kate, who cannot afford to pay for the essay and then sells nudes online. But the fact is that in this kind of mechanism of like progress, like she’s both someone who was like a consumer and a trader in it.
Morgan Sung: Can you describe any of the essay writers you profiled?
Eloise King: The shadows that we profiled were um young students who had then got on to graduate. So the point at which we met them and we spent four years filming with them.
Morgan Sung: Most of the writers in the film are in their early to late 20s. There’s Mercy, a single mother who has a day job, but stays up late writing essays as a side gig. There’s Atticus, who specializes in technical writing for math and engineering classes. And then there’s Chege, the writer who was able to send his sister to university while being forced to put his own educational dreams on hold.
Eloise King: One of the things I suppose I was really interested in focusing on was that after university life, like what is that kind of moment where everything should be great, you get the job of your dreams and actually what we found were a number of people who then ended up finding themselves in this industry for a long time.
Morgan Sung: Eloise said that writers only get about 30% of the fee. The agency takes the rest. Not only are they underpaid, but they also can’t claim any credit for the work that they’re doing. They can’t use any of this experience to apply to universities themselves, especially not graduate programs, because they’re helping students cheat. This industry keeps ghost writers in the shadows. Let’s talk about the cost of anonymity in a new tab. After this break.
Let’s open a new tab. The cost of anonymity.
All of this work is uncredited. Can you talk about how that anonymity puts the writers at a disadvantage?
Eloise King: What you just see is that the writers are doing all of this work, they’re gaining the knowledge, they were really proud to be acquiring so much knowledge, they really saw that as a value to them, you know. But it doesn’t mean that they’re able to add it to their CV, it doesn’t mean that they are able to get into overseas universities to do a master’s degree, even though they might have been supplying the work for years to students who are going to those institutions.
Like presently there’s not a single university in Australia, for example, who would accept an undergraduate degree from Kenya to enter into a master’s program. And yet, they are probably third on the list as recipients of academic writing work from authors in Kenya who have been paid to do it on behalf of the students who are there. They are the ghosts in the cyber wars of these institutions, but they’re never being allowed in through the front door.
Morgan Sung: Patricia, I’m hoping you could answer this next question, but is there any stigma against being a fake essay writer? I mean, how do academic institutions see the role of the shadow scholar?
Patricia Kingori: There isn’t a world that they can be in at the moment as themselves that would give them credit for all of the things that they’ve done. And so the film is really a kind of way to try to ensure that some level of that happens for them.
Morgan Sung: There’s another complication here, too. These academic cheating services are illegal in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and some American states. In the UK, offering these services is actually a criminal offense. Because of that, the documentary uses deepfake technology on some of its interview subjects to conceal their identities and avoid criminalizing them.
But while the film has taken steps to anonymize these writers, essay mill sites themselves aren’t exactly secure. The writers’ legal names and photo IDs, the students’ final papers. All of this can be accessed fairly easily by bad actors. This digital paper trail could come back to haunt both students and writers, especially as more governments move to ban these services.
Patricia Kingori: I think for the writers, we’re not sure how it’s going to affect their future careers, but actually they’ve got very short to medium term needs that there’s no other way for them to meet them, you know. So they have to do this writing really and many of them actually try at the same time to do other work.
For example, as we’ve mentioned with Australia, if they continue to see them as criminals and one of these writers, for example, wants to take up qualifications or have an opportunity in Australia, I don’t know what that will mean in terms of their identity being leaked or something like that.
Eloise King: Well, I just think on like an emotional level and a kind of lived experience level, like having this digital footprint where you made a decision when you were hard up and you were like in your 20s maybe or in your late teens, being there and being like on record and traceable when you have absolutely no idea, it’s just not something that anyone would want and anyone would sign up for.
The idea that like you’re susceptible to any kind of blackmail, like should you find yourself in like public office. And I think that’s on both sides. I think like a very real possibility. And so I think anyone who’s like holding large swathes of data, you know, they might not be nefarious themselves but they might be selling it on.
Morgan Sung: Patricia and Eloise have been following these shadow scholars for over four years. In that time, generative AI tools have rapidly become more sophisticated and accessible. Academic cheating is now as easy as a single click and it costs next to nothing. So is anyone still using essay writing services? What happens to the shadow scholars, whose livelihoods depend on essay writing, if students don’t have to pay a human to cheat?
Let’s open one last tab. Shadow Scholars and AI.
Over the years that the artificial intelligence industry was exploding, Eloise had been keeping tabs on a Facebook group for shadow scholars from all over the world. When she first started working on the film in 2020, it had about 60,000 members. By the time production was over, three years later, that number had roughly tripled.
Eloise King: So you could see how this industry was growing. But that acted as this kind of like town crier, like forum for understanding what people were feeling. And what people felt was in the first instance, like, “Oh God, we are totally over. Like this is the end of the industry. We were already being made invisible and now people are gonna go to this service that’s cheaper and we’re gonna be totally wiped out.”
And by the end, as always, again, what is totally part of this kind of liberatory ideology that seems to sit within it is that people saying, “Well, actually, no, it’s not. It’s not perfect. We have this knowledge, we’ve been doing this for a long time.” And whilst their incomes were definitely and have definitely been impacted by the advent of AI, there was really this pushback that was happening that said, “Actually when you have the knowledge at the source, and you’re able to check it, the quality will be superior.”
But I wonder if Patricia, you can talk much more about like testing and the way that algorithms are like totally detectable by universities. And I think we’ve all become really accustomed to like the long dash. Like when I see that in a reply from someone…
Morgan Sung: Which is tragic for me as a writer. I love the em dash.
Patricia Kingori: There isn’t a uniform position by universities, right? So some universities are like, okay, if you’ve got particular needs, you can use AI. Other people are like under no circumstances do you use AI, and so the writers have been really able to exploit that lack of uniform position as part of a sales tactic to say, “Look, if use AI send your work to us, we will humanize it. We will remove all traces that you’ve had AI and we’ll send it back to you at a cost. It’ll cost you more because actually it requires more expertise to be able to spot all the falsifications, to spot the ways that AI hallucinates, to check all the references. We will do that detailed work and we will send it to you if you want to use AI. Or we can continue to do something bespoke for you.”
So I think it has definitely shaped the way that they work because they’re getting many more students who are sending them things that they’ve used AI and said, “Can you make this look like I haven’t used AI,” and are charging them for that. Yet again, we’re in this world where we would rather think that AI has absolutely no human involvement than actually acknowledge the fact that it requires enormous amounts of human capital to make it happen in the first place.
Morgan Sung: I think that was the most interesting takeaway for me being a tech reporter watching the film was seeing the way that this industry of people adapted. Like Patricia said, this work is even more specialized than just writing the essay to make it sound human and to spot these kind of inconsistencies that only exist with AI. But at the same time, it seems to push them further into the shadows.
Eloise King: I think it really does. I think you’ve kind of hit on something that we found in this film. There was this perpetual loop that would happen where just at the moment you think there is a shift or reckoning that allows them to be seen and to be acknowledged, like there is another systemic move that further pushes them into the background.
And I think AI is kind of coalesces into two things, doesn’t it? It’s like, one, people would rather think that like robots and computers are going to like take over the world and they’re like so smart. But what it does is it comes up against an innate prejudice where people for years have thought that the “Africans” need to, and I use that like term because you know that’s how people use it in this sweeping term, like that they need to be educated, they need be taught how to be civilized, and actually what too many imaginations cannot hold is the reality that there are millions of educated people in the fastest growing youth population on the planet who are having access to technology that allows them to share their education. That was an inheritance of colonial settlements and imposed education systems.
And so all of these things are totally intertwined. The prejudice that people think that they couldn’t be that smart to begin with and the prejudice that then denies when proof is beyond needing any more evidence that it still finds a way to deny them of this.
Morgan Sung: Many shadow scholars have pivoted to editing and humanizing AI-generated writing. But AI itself keeps advancing. There are now countless AI tools that claim to be able to humanize other AI-generated text in order to bypass AI detection tools. Right now, those tools still don’t compare to actual human-written work. But at some point in the future, will shadow scholars become redundant?
Patricia Kingori: I think they will continue to adapt in ways that we haven’t even thought about yet, because we haven t been able to predict how they’ve lasted this long in the face of all of these different challenges. So, as long as there is demand, there will be these writers and I think there will continue be demand because institutions need to find ways to judge who is good or who isn’t good. And so I think that’s an important thing for us to think about. Is it possible that we can have a world where these qualifications start to mean something different, right, and who is good or not?
Morgan Sung: Shadow scholars have been fighting for recognition long before AI was a problem. Even though the documentary conceals individual writers’ identities, Eloise hopes that it at least makes more people aware of the industry. It’s not mysterious criminals powering essay mills, but real writers who are forced into the shadows because they don’t have the same opportunities as students in the global North.
This documentary is also a kind of reckoning for academia. What does it mean for these institutions, if they’re awarding degrees and certifications to people who didn’t actually do the work to get them? And the people who did do the work are prevented from entering those very institutions.
Next week, we’ll look at how this is playing out with younger students as we dive into how teachers are handling AI in their classrooms.
The documentary, “The Shadow Scholars,” hits UK theaters on September 18th. For updates on this and further screenings, follow @ShadowScholarsFilm on Instagram.
For now, let’s close all these tabs.
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva, and edited by Chris Egusa.
Close All Tabs producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Additional editing by Chris Hambrick and Jen Chien, who is KQED’s Director of Podcasts. Our audio engineer is Brendan Willard. Original music, including our theme song and credits, by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM.
Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager and Ethan Toven-Lindsay is our Editor in Chief.
Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund.
Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.
Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dustsilver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron Red switches.
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