THE STORY – When Oxford Professor Patricia Kingori travels to Kenya, she uncovers the murky, multi-billion global underworld of essay-writing. Thousands of young and highly educated Kenyans – overqualified and chronically underemployed – have found lucrative work writing essays for students around the globe who are able and willing to pay for them. It’s a complex portrait of an issue that undermines the foundations of a pillar of humanity: education.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Eloise King (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 98 Minutes
A feature from early May by Intelligencer writer James D. Walsh reads like a well-researched and expertly polished ghost story. Published under the headline “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” Walsh spoke to dozens of current college students and recent graduates in an effort to discover whether or not, as his subheadline reads, “ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.” His findings mainly – and terrifyingly – support the idea that OpenAI’s generative chatbot has rendered the typical expectations of higher education participants, like doing their own work, nonessential. Instead of taking notes and using their newfound knowledge to write an essay, most of the students Walsh interviewed noted that they’ve become reliant on ChatGPT; Sarah, a freshman at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, told him that she’s so addicted to Tik Tok (in addition to her chatbot cheat sheet) that her eyes will start to burn after scrolling for a few hours, which makes the two hours (rather than 12) she has to spend writing an essay with ChatGPT’s help far less painful than it might have otherwise been. Brian Patrick Green, a tech ethics scholar at Santa Clara University, told Walsh, “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”
Imagine for a moment what homework and learning, in general, might look like if ChatGPT wasn’t in the picture. You might be chuckling to yourself, muttering, “It would just look like my life in college.” And for some, that’s true. But Patricia Kingori, a British-Kenyan researcher and sociologist, as well as the youngest Black woman professor in Oxford’s 925-year history, has uncovered a different way that students (especially the particularly wealthy ones) are passing off their work to a machine of sorts. Only in this case, that machine is human: “They’re writing essays for students in Global North universities,” Vili Lehdonvirta, a Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research, shares with Kingori. “A lot of this online labor is happening in places where there’s a strong IT outsourcing industry.” Kenya stands out, in particular. 72 percent of the online labor in Kenya is related to writing essays for those aforementioned students.
What Eloise King’s “The Shadow Scholars“ sets out to understand isn’t so much why this has become a trend but why it specifically became a booming business enterprise in Kenya. The workers – who remain anonymous due to King’s unfortunate use of AI-generated faces that cover their own – are overqualified for their everyday tasks. Yet, the opportunities to use their practical skills are not available, thus rendering a “Shadow Scholar“ gig the most attractive, high-paying option. Kingori’s research is the foundation for King’s documentary, and as its star, Kingori is shown in pursuit of answers. Who are the people behind this educational underworld? Why are they willing to do what they do? How did this become so common, so high in demand, and so unavoidable to the point where higher education and education as a system are being threatened like never before?
There’s a chance that ChatGPT might give you more of a concrete answer – or at least an attempt at one – than King’s doc does, but that’s because King is a human, and chatbots are programmed to provide definitive answers to our questions, even if they’re entirely incorrect. In fact, “The Shadow Scholars,“ while fascinating and dispiriting in equal measure, is a lot like asking Siri a question and hoping for her to spit one back at you in seconds; more than likely, you’ll hear, “I found this on the web,“ and have to do more research yourself. That’s less a discredit to King and Kingori’s work here than it is an indictment of both the artificial intelligence industry – one that is simultaneously rapid in its eager evolution and incapable of understanding itself – and the human side that the filmmakers are interested in here.
It’s not that these laborers’ motivations are all that difficult to comprehend. Economic insecurity is rampant in Kenya, leading many of them to take on writing gigs late into the night after a full shift at their day job and an evening of parenting their young children. But the psychological impact of this work, which Kingori probes for much “The Shadow Scholars,“ never really goes beyond the likes of physical exhaustion and what Kingori and her fellow researchers assume the reverberations should be, even if explicit findings don’t back their hypotheses. It’s simple enough to infer how it must feel for these workers to make as little as one dollar an hour “while cheating Western teenagers take the credit“ and for the essay mills they’re employed by to take a bulk of their commission for themselves. Yet Kingori’s desire to understand how they see themselves tends to come up empty; she feels remorse while they express appreciation for their situation.
In a sense, this is more effective from an emotional perspective. Watching the gig workers’ excitement as they see money entering their accounts, even though it is still far less than they should be earning, is as heartbreaking as the education crisis the documentary (executive produced by Steve McQueen) also explores. Another film entirely that explores precisely what lengths today’s students are willing to go to in pursuit of top marks despite their own knowledge is worthwhile considering Kingori’s research alone (One of the clients, who is all heard in voiceover, recalls selling nude photos of herself in order to raise $300 to have her essay written by an online mill employee). But for all the work “The Shadow Scholars“ does to understand its central predicament, the alarming lack of answers it supplies by the time 101 minutes have passed makes us feel like there’s more to be done on our end. Ironic. Isn’t it? Hoping someone else will answer every question we have, only to realize that we should have been doing our own work all along.
