The shadow of AI has been looming over us since the first steps in computer technologies were made in the 20^th century. Machines were used in cautionary tales in various roles, first in literature and then film. They were rebellious, fighting for their autonomy. They were to wipe us out as the source of irrationality and reign supreme over the sterile planet. They were too helpful, making us lazy and thus paving the way for humanity’s downfall. Sometimes, they were pure and naïve, more humane than the people who created them, holding a mirror to our flaws. Yet in capitalist society, one fear always remained particularly persistent: the robots were to take our jobs.

In 2023, it seems, the gloomy prophecies began to be fulfilled: generative AIs started threatening swaths of creative professions that were considered safe from automation: Midjourney took graphic designers and illustrators out of work, Speechify stole bread away from voice actors, and ChatGPT made copywriters and authors jobless. Or did they?

Maybe not as dramatically, but ChatGPT did transform many industries, and online custom writing companies are no exception.

The Risks of Essay Writing Service Industry Facing Automation

We spoke with Marcia Davis, a marketing specialist at one of the companies specializing in writing help, asking her about the challenges the business faced in the past year and sources of resilience that helped her company persevere through the changes.

“There was a detectable drop in new customers that coincided with ChatGPT being rolled out to the public, but we managed to keep our loyal returning customers so far,” she said.

Marcia’s company mostly caters to students, creating sample papers in various genres, from one-page essays to thesis projects. Although ChatGPT has chipped away at the new leads pool, the decline might be due to a combination of factors – not all tied to technological advancements. “There was a steady increase in orders since the beginning of the pandemic when lockdown forced students out of the classrooms and made their academic experiences lackluster and disconnected.”

Indeed, students deprived of face-to-face instruction, class discussions, and office hours were less motivated to do their share of “independent research,” seen as pointless and divorced from the realities of their future careers. Moreover, writing assignments increased in volume during the pandemic, partly replacing all the class work that was supposed to be done in the form of seminars and debates.

For disenchanted students, it meant more time stuck in front of the screen. Overwhelmed with Zoom fatigue, many had decided that enough was enough and turned to writing companies to reclaim some of the time they felt they lost.

Returning to the classroom after the quarantine restrictions are lifted could be responsible for declining writing service sales. “We can look at this as things returning to the pre-pandemic normal,” continued Marcia. “The fact that it coincided with ChatGPT’s release muddles up our data, so it’s too early to say which was the key factor here.”

Some specialists argue that ChatGPT’s influence on students and the writing service industry is more complex than simply tempting students away with the possibility of just generating the whole assignment free instead of ordering it for money. According to a study by Academia Group, 43% of undergraduates reported using some AI-powered tool to help them with their papers. Yet only 4% of all queries admitted they used AI to generate the entire paper, i.e., used AI as a replacement for an essay writing service.

Most students used AI as a help – to battle writer’s block, research, brainstorm topics or key arguments, translate, proofread, etc. One can argue that ChatGPT makes writing more accessible to the less experienced, attracting those students who would otherwise have considered turning for help to a paid service. ChatGPT undertook part of the work from college writing centers.

“I think it’s great!” said Marcia when asked how she felt about this development. “At our company, we love writing. We believe this is an essential skill for self-expression and communication crossing cultural and class divides. The fact that AI makes more people interested in writing through this interactive experience is a positive.”

One cannot help but admire this humanitarian sentiment; surely, it’s bad for business. As it turns out, not necessarily.

Will Essay Writing Services Persevere?

“There always were, and there always will be, students who need a hand-crafted paper of good quality. Ads for writing help can be found in student newspapers dating back a century. Leaflets on corkboards promising to “write your essay for you” aren’t going anywhere. Neither are writing services that offer superior writing. Schools always looked at this activity askance, but here we are, all those years later,” continues Marcia.

Why, despite the abundance of free writing tools like online editors and libraries, free essay writing service, how-to guides and samples, etc., are students still willing to pay someone for doing their assignment?

Some reasons are as old as the hills: young people aren’t very good at planning and assessing how much time each task can take. They procrastinate, work themselves into a corner, and then look for the simplest way out. Often, the best option they see is buying a paper instead of facing the dire consequences of failing grades. Considering how much often hinges on that one paper – a GPA, a scholarship, a future envisioned – it isn’t surprising that students resort to these drastic measures.

However, this is not the only reason. Higher education has been becoming more and more transactional over the years. Instead of a place for purely academic pursuit and personal growth, college became a stepping-stone to a better, higher-paying job. College degrees are advertised as: a toll road to economic prosperity.

Do they deliver, though?

The sad experience of the entire generation weighted down by enormous student debt they cannot repay is an obvious answer. A college degree does not guarantee employment. Moreover, it doesn’t prepare young people for the realities of work. School assignments are designed to exercise the mind, but too often, they have nothing to do with the challenges graduates will face in the workplace – and they definitely aren’t what the school has advertised.

“We have many returning customers who order assignments for the same academic disciplines. Usually, it’s some auxiliary courses they don’t see as useful. They are intelligent and enterprising young people who work parallel to their studies. They are quite capable of writing those papers. They just don’t want to waste their time on this,” shares Marcia.

However, why not AI? After all, feeding your assignment sheet into an LLM dialog window and hitting “Generate” is faster than placing the order – and it’s free. Shouldn’t this be a concern? As it turns out, not really. Large Language Models like ChatGPT are good imitators, but they cannot produce genuinely original conclusions and cannot perform analysis like a human writer. AI isn’t very successful even with more straightforward writing tasks like citing sources or providing relevant evidence. Some teachers who welcomed AI into the classroom and encouraged their students to use the technology to generate papers report that results were subpar – mostly below a typical paper they would rate as C-. Why?

Multiple reasons. Mostly inaccuracies like confused timelines, invented personalities, and quotes that do not exist anywhere else. AIs like ChatGPT generate – they improvise based on the data they’ve been fed. This means they invent quotations that look like those they’ve seen. They create believable article titles from where those quotations were supposedly taken, but it’s all generated. Sometimes, they ascribe those invented phrases to an existing scholar working in the relevant field. Sometimes, they invent the person as well. AI can create an imitation that looks like an academic paper but not an actual paper. This deception becomes evident to any grader who fact-checks or at least works in the field and knows the seminal works.

Another reason is style, which is very detectably generic. “Once you’ve read several AI-generated papers, you begin to recognize the signature,” continues Marcia. “And it’s different from an average student writing.” According to her, ChatGPT doesn’t make the same grammar and spelling mistakes that a student would have made, but at the same time commits different faux pas like repetitiveness, lack of logical transitions, or peculiar wording.

That is why, despite ChatGPT and other AI tools offering quicker and cheaper solutions to students unwilling to waste their time, Marcia is optimistic about her service. Indeed, while many essay mills churning out cheap generic papers tanked after the advent of large language models, academic boutiques that offer quality samples and personal assistance managed to keep afloat, largely thanks to their already existing client base.

“Schools are perfecting AI-detecting tools. They are now almost as efficient as anti-plagiarism software,” adds Marcia. On the other hand, detecting a particular student’s writing style, especially when it develops and changes, is a much more complex task that only a human grader can do – and still with no 100% certainty.

Maybe with a more personalized approach, more individual guidance, and a more thoughtful curriculum that considers each particular student’s career goals, writing services will become obsolete, but not before. “It will take a lot of human effort to put us out of the job, not AI,” concludes Marcia. So far, it looks like she is right.

The shadow of AI has been looming over us since the first steps in computer technologies were made in the 20^th century. Machines were used in cautionary tales in various roles, first in literature and then film. They were rebellious, fighting for their autonomy. They were to wipe us out as the source of irrationality and reign supreme over the sterile planet. They were too helpful, making us lazy and thus paving the way for humanity’s downfall. Sometimes, they were pure and naïve, more humane than the people who created them, holding a mirror to our flaws. Yet in capitalist society, one fear always remained particularly persistent: the robots were to take our jobs.

In 2023, it seems, the gloomy prophecies began to be fulfilled: generative AIs started threatening swaths of creative professions that were considered safe from automation: Midjourney took graphic designers and illustrators out of work, Speechify stole bread away from voice actors, and ChatGPT made copywriters and authors jobless. Or did they?

Maybe not as dramatically, but ChatGPT did transform many industries, and online custom writing companies are no exception.

The Risks of Essay Writing Service Industry Facing Automation

We spoke with Marcia Davis, a marketing specialist at one of the companies specializing in writing help, asking her about the challenges the business faced in the past year and sources of resilience that helped her company persevere through the changes.

“There was a detectable drop in new customers that coincided with ChatGPT being rolled out to the public, but we managed to keep our loyal returning customers so far,” she said.

Marcia’s company mostly caters to students, creating sample papers in various genres, from one-page essays to thesis projects. Although ChatGPT has chipped away at the new leads pool, the decline might be due to a combination of factors – not all tied to technological advancements. “There was a steady increase in orders since the beginning of the pandemic when lockdown forced students out of the classrooms and made their academic experiences lackluster and disconnected.”

Indeed, students deprived of face-to-face instruction, class discussions, and office hours were less motivated to do their share of “independent research,” seen as pointless and divorced from the realities of their future careers. Moreover, writing assignments increased in volume during the pandemic, partly replacing all the class work that was supposed to be done in the form of seminars and debates.

For disenchanted students, it meant more time stuck in front of the screen. Overwhelmed with Zoom fatigue, many had decided that enough was enough and turned to writing companies to reclaim some of the time they felt they lost.

Returning to the classroom after the quarantine restrictions are lifted could be responsible for declining writing service sales. “We can look at this as things returning to the pre-pandemic normal,” continued Marcia. “The fact that it coincided with ChatGPT’s release muddles up our data, so it’s too early to say which was the key factor here.”

Some specialists argue that ChatGPT’s influence on students and the writing service industry is more complex than simply tempting students away with the possibility of just generating the whole assignment free instead of ordering it for money. According to a study by Academia Group, 43% of undergraduates reported using some AI-powered tool to help them with their papers. Yet only 4% of all queries admitted they used AI to generate the entire paper, i.e., used AI as a replacement for an essay writing service.

Most students used AI as a help – to battle writer’s block, research, brainstorm topics or key arguments, translate, proofread, etc. One can argue that ChatGPT makes writing more accessible to the less experienced, attracting those students who would otherwise have considered turning for help to a paid service. ChatGPT undertook part of the work from college writing centers.

“I think it’s great!” said Marcia when asked how she felt about this development. “At our company, we love writing. We believe this is an essential skill for self-expression and communication crossing cultural and class divides. The fact that AI makes more people interested in writing through this interactive experience is a positive.”

One cannot help but admire this humanitarian sentiment; surely, it’s bad for business. As it turns out, not necessarily.

Will Essay Writing Services Persevere?

“There always were, and there always will be, students who need a hand-crafted paper of good quality. Ads for writing help can be found in student newspapers dating back a century. Leaflets on corkboards promising to “write your essay for you” aren’t going anywhere. Neither are writing services that offer superior writing. Schools always looked at this activity askance, but here we are, all those years later,” continues Marcia.

Why, despite the abundance of free writing tools like online editors and libraries, free essay writing service, how-to guides and samples, etc., are students still willing to pay someone for doing their assignment?

Some reasons are as old as the hills: young people aren’t very good at planning and assessing how much time each task can take. They procrastinate, work themselves into a corner, and then look for the simplest way out. Often, the best option they see is buying a paper instead of facing the dire consequences of failing grades. Considering how much often hinges on that one paper – a GPA, a scholarship, a future envisioned – it isn’t surprising that students resort to these drastic measures.

However, this is not the only reason. Higher education has been becoming more and more transactional over the years. Instead of a place for purely academic pursuit and personal growth, college became a stepping-stone to a better, higher-paying job. College degrees are advertised as: a toll road to economic prosperity.

Do they deliver, though?

The sad experience of the entire generation weighted down by enormous student debt they cannot repay is an obvious answer. A college degree does not guarantee employment. Moreover, it doesn’t prepare young people for the realities of work. School assignments are designed to exercise the mind, but too often, they have nothing to do with the challenges graduates will face in the workplace – and they definitely aren’t what the school has advertised.

“We have many returning customers who order assignments for the same academic disciplines. Usually, it’s some auxiliary courses they don’t see as useful. They are intelligent and enterprising young people who work parallel to their studies. They are quite capable of writing those papers. They just don’t want to waste their time on this,” shares Marcia.

However, why not AI? After all, feeding your assignment sheet into an LLM dialog window and hitting “Generate” is faster than placing the order – and it’s free. Shouldn’t this be a concern? As it turns out, not really. Large Language Models like ChatGPT are good imitators, but they cannot produce genuinely original conclusions and cannot perform analysis like a human writer. AI isn’t very successful even with more straightforward writing tasks like citing sources or providing relevant evidence. Some teachers who welcomed AI into the classroom and encouraged their students to use the technology to generate papers report that results were subpar – mostly below a typical paper they would rate as C-. Why?

Multiple reasons. Mostly inaccuracies like confused timelines, invented personalities, and quotes that do not exist anywhere else. AIs like ChatGPT generate – they improvise based on the data they’ve been fed. This means they invent quotations that look like those they’ve seen. They create believable article titles from where those quotations were supposedly taken, but it’s all generated. Sometimes, they ascribe those invented phrases to an existing scholar working in the relevant field. Sometimes, they invent the person as well. AI can create an imitation that looks like an academic paper but not an actual paper. This deception becomes evident to any grader who fact-checks or at least works in the field and knows the seminal works.

Another reason is style, which is very detectably generic. “Once you’ve read several AI-generated papers, you begin to recognize the signature,” continues Marcia. “And it’s different from an average student writing.” According to her, ChatGPT doesn’t make the same grammar and spelling mistakes that a student would have made, but at the same time commits different faux pas like repetitiveness, lack of logical transitions, or peculiar wording.

That is why, despite ChatGPT and other AI tools offering quicker and cheaper solutions to students unwilling to waste their time, Marcia is optimistic about her service. Indeed, while many essay mills churning out cheap generic papers tanked after the advent of large language models, academic boutiques that offer quality samples and personal assistance managed to keep afloat, largely thanks to their already existing client base.

“Schools are perfecting AI-detecting tools. They are now almost as efficient as anti-plagiarism software,” adds Marcia. On the other hand, detecting a particular student’s writing style, especially when it develops and changes, is a much more complex task that only a human grader can do – and still with no 100% certainty.

Maybe with a more personalized approach, more individual guidance, and a more thoughtful curriculum that considers each particular student’s career goals, writing services will become obsolete, but not before. “It will take a lot of human effort to put us out of the job, not AI,” concludes Marcia. So far, it looks like she is right.