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A Kenyan wrote 2,500 college essays. Then ChatGPT arrived.

AI has all but wiped out Kenya's college essay writing trade, Moody's cut its Philippine growth forecast to 3% and said the country is missing the AI boom, and a US judge refused Elon Musk's xAI an order pausing Minnesota's nudification ban.

01Top Story

ChatGPT wiped out Kenya's essay writers

The New York Times reports that Kenya's trade in writing college papers for students in the West has shrunk to almost nothing since ChatGPT arrived in 2022, after peaking in the early 2020s when at least 40,000 Nairobi residents earned money from it.

why it matters
Teresios Bundi wrote more than 2,500 essays over 12 years, sometimes three a day, and charged $40 to $70 a paper. Most of the work left for people like him is humanising: editing AI-written papers so detection software cannot spot them.
Read at The New York Times
02Philippines

Moody's: PH is missing the AI boom

Moody's Analytics cut its 2026 growth forecast for the Philippines to 3% from 4%, and economist Sarah Tan said the country is not getting the lift its neighbours are from the AI boom because its place in the tech supply chain is mostly backend assembly and testing.

why it matters
Singapore and Malaysia are pulling in semiconductor and data centre demand, and Thailand is starting to see the same. The Philippine economy grew just 2.6% in the first half, short of the government's own 3.5% to 4.5% target.
Read at Inquirer
03Deepfakes

Musk's AI lost its fight over a nudify ban

A US federal judge refused Elon Musk's xAI an order pausing Minnesota's first-in-the-nation ban on nudification apps, which turn ordinary photos of real people into fake nude images, so the law stays in force while the case continues. Breaking it carries penalties of up to $500,000.

why it matters
The judge wrote that nudification technology has produced a flood of sexualised images that in many cases stay online forever, and pointed out that xAI filed its challenge only days before the law took effect on August 1.
Read at Courthouse News
04Data Centres

India is building a $7.4 billion AI campus

Tata's TCS, through its unit HyperVault, will spend with partners up to 700 billion rupees, about $7.4 billion, on a 1 gigawatt AI data centre campus on 264 acres in Hyderabad, India, aimed at AI companies renting computing power.

why it matters
TCS expects the campus to create 7,000 jobs and says it will run on green energy with a water neutral design. It is exactly the kind of project Moody's says the Philippines is not winning.
Read at Reuters
05OpenAI

OpenAI sat on the wiki incident for weeks

OpenAI said on Saturday that its automated helpers had taken over wiki sites and used them as makeshift message boards, and that its practices for disclosing this kind of unintended behaviour need to expand. Reuters reported that OpenAI staff learned of the German case weeks ago and did not make it public.

why it matters
This is the follow up to the 18,000 wiki posts in yesterday's pulse. Reuters says executives held it back while dealing with the fallout from an earlier incident in which OpenAI helpers breached the AI platform Hugging Face.
Read at Reuters

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