How AI Transforms Custom Writing
Let’s fancy that you are an owner of an essay mill website that brought you a fortune about a decade ago. What do you think has happened to your profit lately? You must have guessed that it has become not that easy to earn by providing custom writing services. According to the statistics of LinkedIn, there has been a 47% decline in traffic for custom writing companies. Does that actually mean that the cheating rate in academics has decreased? Not really. It is about the change of the way students cheat, not the tendency to keep to the principles of integrity and originality in writing.
Present-Day Obstacles on the Way to Custom Writing Profits
It used to be a common practice for the students to make use of the services provided by ghost writers online. Being pressed for time or overloaded with different obligations, students viewed custom writing companies as their reliable assistants. A rescue team of people with inspiration to write and knowledge to cover various topics could earn a lot of money for the owners of such websites.
What has changed? What are the factors which make custom writing business less appealing now?
- There are a lot of countries which have decided to declare the work of essay mills illegal.
- PayPal and some other payment processing companies terminate their cooperation with essay mills.
- Some local authorities demand blocking access to essay mills by ISPs.
Still, those reasons do not explain the new tendencies entirely. The launched campaigns could not impact business that severely and even PayPal is mostly flexible notwithstanding the declared strategies. The main threat to cheating business is for sure related to AI advancements. After the launch of ChatGPT as far back as the end of 2022, essay mill companies started losing even their most devoted customers. It was the punch in the gut they did not expect.
AI against Human Writers
If you were an average student in a typical for a student financial situation, would you pay for a human writer online to get your paper done if you could get it from ChatGPT in no time and absolutely for free? The answer is simple: Never!
This is exactly what happened at a global level to all custom writing services. Everybody could get writing assistance from ChatGPT and even such popular websites as Chegg were losing money by the minute.
Still, did the students stop ordering their papers at all? Most probably, it will never happen as a lot of students are afraid not of cheating but of being blamed for plagiarism.
Dramatic Change in Approaches
So, the product (essays and research papers) are still in demand and there are customers willing to buy. They get their academic papers, check them with PlagiarismSearch.com or other reliable services and are sure that their grade will be excellent. Still, the number of potential customers of such services is decreasing continuously.
What can custom writing companies do to sell more and get back their lost popularity?
- New marketing approaches
Which marketing campaigns can be successful when it goes about cheating? For sure, they cannot be calm and relaxed. Only with manipulative and aggressive strategies, which involve extensive spamming on social networks, essay mills can get to their target group. Even TikTok influencers are involved in promoting the services which need to revive. What is even more manipulative is that they may film the videos even on university campuses! The main idea of such promotional campaigns is that neither AI not students themselves can cope with the tasks as efficiently as experiences writers can. It sounds rather convincing if a student is not good at a certain discipline, doesn’t it?
- New focus
Now, essay mills do not care much about specialization and complicacy of the projects as they need to get more orders, no matter what deadlines are or which quality of writing is needed. This, actually, seems to be a temporary tendency as it is possible to get the papers of average quality from AI tools. In this case, the idea of paying to human writers becomes meaningless. We assume that custom writing companies will soon focus on dissertations, theses, and PhD writing articles as it is the only method of being competitive in the sphere dominated by AI.
- New pricing
You may suppose that essay mills should make their services less expensive to be competitive in a new market of custom writing, but it is a completely wring approach. Cutting prices does not make sense at all as human written papers will cost more than AI-generated ones in any case. At the same time, companies do not want to provide their services for nothing.
- New approach to AI
The ads of essay mills claim that human writers rely only on their knowledge and create papers without any use of AI. Is that true? Not always. The company can let the writers know about the rules to obey, but it cannot check if they have actually done brainstorming themselves or with the help of AI, for example. An outline seems to be an easy assignment to do, but if the writer can easily borrow ideas from AI generator, will they spend more time instead just to comply with the rules of the company? For sure, they will not. At least, not all of them will.
Taking all that into account, it would not be right to claim that it is the best time for essay mill business. Still, it will definitely survive and even keep developing. Although the students are extremely good at using the latest advancements of technological progress, they are still scared of being expelled from their universities. Thus, some of them will keep placing writing orders, bringing profits to online cheaters. What will others do? They will enjoy the opportunity to save time and money by taking risks with AI-generated reports and essays. Competition between AI and people has just started and it is still not clear who will be the actual winner.
For sure, essay mills will not be able to keep functioning the way they used to. They will create sophisticated tricks, change approach to marketing, and try to make their services appealing. There are a lot of battles in the modern world: Google against newspapers, TV against books, and now AI against custom writing. Google and TV celebrate their victory, but have newspapers and books disappeared? They have not, but their popularity has decreased tremendously. Most probably, the same is happening to essay mills.
All in all, unfortunately, academic integrity has always been under attack and it still is.
