Why is there so much ai stories now

[Kaseywolf]

I keep finding stories I'm 100% certain are AI but are not marked as AI. It seems like everyone also can't tell it's ai?! It's pissing me off cause I would like to know it's AI when I go to read it. It sets a certain expectation. Instead I'll get 3 or 4 chapters in and the whole time I can't anjoy it cause my brain is twigging "this has to be ai" then finally something pings the wrong way and I know it's AI.

It bothers me so much cause it's not marked. Yeah I've posted my own ai slop but I marked it as ai. And my other story isn't AI at all. It's super rude to hide if you are writing with AI or not.

 

[Sadim]

It seems like everyone also can't tell it's ai?!

Click to shrink...

That is the problem.

You can't instantly tell if it's AI because the writing has a lot in common with a hobbyist writer who's just starting out writing online, after acquiring the basic skills and enough confidence to post what they write.

An author with about a hundred hours of experience will still write worse stories than AI, so long as you aren't getting into power-scaling (which AI sucks at but most authors and writers can properly grasp, if they want to write a serious story).

Between the lack of things to read, an interesting premise and a promising-enough execution to stick with it for a while, you get a lot of people viewing AI stories, at least until things get thoroughly fucked up in some kind of way.

And on the end of the publisher? It's barely any effort for a whole lot of likes and attention.

You can stay on the front page and otherwise increase your story's visibility pretty easily if you can toss out a dozen chapters a day.

That's just not a (normal) human writing pace.

People engaging with the threads also increases visibility, but AI stories tend to rely on just spamming chapters instead.


So yeah. Costs are low and rewards are high, at least on the part of the creator.

That would not be true (to that extent) if they truthfully tagged their story, so they don't.

 

[Kaseywolf]

The weird part is I can tell for sure it's AI but I'll look at the comments and no one else can seem to tell it's ai. Idk it's annoying to me.

 

[Povovanon]

Can you tell the horny classroom who lied and wrote AI-slop?

 

[D'waawwu]

For the same reason you see a lot of AI pictures.

 

[Kaseywolf]

the only reason im not naming names is cause i think it may be against the rules of the forums

 

[FreeCityMagnate]

Just assume it's AI unless they explicitly state otherwise.

Here is an essay that I didn't AI generate, I swear guys believe me.

Spoiler: Polycentric Governance is the future.

# Polycentric Governance is the future.

## How Aid Perpetuates Extractive Monism

**Humanitarian aid completes the extractive cycle Africa was trapped in.**

### The Aid-as-Extraction Pattern

Colonial extraction worked like this:
- External power takes resources/surplus out
- Local economy remains weak and dependent
- Local institutions atrophy because they're unnecessary
- Population depends on external actors for survival

**Humanitarian aid mirrors this structure exactly:**
- External organizations (NGOs, UN, donors) provide goods/services
- Local markets for those goods/services never develop
- Local entrepreneurs, merchants, guilds can't compete with free
- Population depends on aid organizations instead of building local supply chains
- State has no incentive to tax or serve citizens (aid funds it instead)

### Destroying Pluralism Twice Over

Colonial powers destroy indigenous pluralism (guilds, merchant networks, market associations). Aid prevents its reconstruction.

**Example: Food aid in sub-Saharan Africa**
- Free grain floods markets → local farmers can't sell → farming collapses
- Food security becomes aid-dependent
- No merchant class develops to distribute food
- No negotiation between state and market actors occurs
- Citizens don't demand state accountability for food security; they depend on external organizations

**This is worse than colonialism in one way:** At least colonial extraction eventually ended. Aid dependency is indefinite and self-perpetuating.

### The Institutional Lock-In

When aid provides services, the state has no incentive to develop:
- Tax systems (why tax if donors fund you?)
- Public services (why build schools if NGOs do it?)
- Accountability mechanisms (aid organizations don't represent citizens)
- Rule of law (accountability flows upward to donors, not downward to people)

**Meanwhile, pluralist actors never emerge:**
- Merchants can't build trading networks (aid undercuts them)
- Communities don't form organizations to advocate for services (aid provides them paternalistically)
- Civil society remains weak because it's not needed for survival
- No negotiation between state and citizens happens

The state stays extractive monism but now dependent on external actors rather than powerful enough to be constrained by them.

### The Donor Dependency Trap

This creates a perverse incentive structure:
- **Weak states are rewarded with aid** (the more dysfunctional, the more emergency aid)
- **Strong developmental states get less aid** (they've "graduated")
- **Aid creates constituencies** (local elites benefit from aid distribution; aid organizations create local jobs)
- **Aid becomes political**, flowing to allies, not to effective institutions

**Result:** The aid system incentivizes maintaining extractive weakness rather than building inclusive institutions.

A state that taxes citizens, builds courts, and creates rule of law stops receiving emergency aid. A state that remains dependent on external charity keeps the flow coming.
Aid has accidentally optimized for perpetuating the exact institutional structure that prevents development.

---

Why this prevents the democratic pluralism that Africa needs, and what alternative approaches might actually work.

Democracy requires pluralist actors who negotiate power. Aid eliminates their necessity.

### The Negotiation Problem

Liberal democracy develops when multiple power centers, guilds, merchants, churches, local councils, workers demand constraints on the state.
This happens because they need the state's cooperation but won't accept domination.

**The negotiation sequence:**
1. Pluralist actor needs something the state controls
2. State needs what pluralist actor produces/commands
3. Both sides negotiate → institutions develop → rights get codified

**Aid breaks step 1 and 2:**
- Citizens don't need state services (aid provides them)
- State doesn't need citizens (donors fund it)
- No negotiation occurs
- No institutions develop to enshrine constraints

**Result:** The state remains monist—centralized, accountable only to external donors, extractive by design, but citizens never build the power to constrain it.

### The Missing Constituency for Democracy

Democracy doesn't emerge from abstract principles. It emerges when:
- **Merchants demand contract law and property rights** (to trade safely)
- **Workers demand representation** (to improve conditions)
- **Communities demand local autonomy** (to govern themselves)

Each demands institutions that constrain state power because they need leverage.

**In the aid-dependent state:**
- Merchants can't compete with free goods (no constituency for market institutions)
- Workers depend on aid employment, not state jobs (no constituency for labor rights)
- Communities depend on aid organizations, not local governance (no constituency for autonomy)

There's no internal pressure to build democratic institutions. The state can remain authoritarian because citizens' survival doesn't depend on it, it depends on donors.

### The Foreign Aid Oligarchy

Instead, aid creates its own power structure:
- **Aid elites** (those who distribute or partner with aid organizations) gain power
- **State officials** who liaison with donors gain leverage over citizens
- **International organizations** become the real authority
- **Citizens** remain passive recipients, not agents

This looks nothing like pluralism. **It's external monism wearing pluralist clothing.**

---

## Alternative: Building on Indigenous Capacity

**What if development invested in pluralist reconstruction instead of aid replacement?**

### Principle 1: Enable, Don't Replace

Instead of aid organizations providing services, fund local merchants and entrepreneurs to provide them.

**Example: Health**
- *Current:* Free clinics run by NGOs destroy local healthcare markets
- *Alternative:* Subsidize citizens to buy from local clinics; fund training for local health entrepreneurs
- *Effect:* Healthcare sector develops; merchants emerge; accountability flows to customers, not donors

**Example: Food**
- *Current:* Food aid destroys local agriculture
- *Alternative:* Buy grain from local farmers; let them sell to markets; support cooperatives
- *Effect:* Farming thrives; merchant networks develop; farmers gain bargaining power

### Principle 2: Build State Capacity Through Taxation

A state that taxes citizens must serve them. A state funded by donors can ignore them.

**Fund transition to tax-based states:**
- Temporary aid, conditional on building tax systems
- Revenue stays with state (not extracted)
- Citizens see state as their service provider, not external charity
- State becomes accountable to citizens, not donors
- Pluralist pressure emerges naturally (taxpayers demand accountability)

**This rebuilds the social contract:** Citizens pay → state serves → citizens demand representation.

### Principle 3: Protect Indigenous Institutions

**Stop undermining guilds, cooperatives, religious organizations, and community councils.**

- Recognize market associations and artisan guilds
- Fund (don't replace) community governance structures
- Protect property rights for local merchants and cooperatives
- Enable religious institutions to provide services without state monopoly

**This allows pluralism to regenerate from within**, not imposed from outside.

---

## Why This Matters for the Whole Argument

**The sequence must be:**
1. **Pluralist actors rebuild** (merchants, communities, cooperatives, civil society)
2. **They negotiate with state** → institutions develop, constraints emerge
3. **State capacity grows through taxation** (now accountable to citizens)
4. **Democracy becomes possible** (pluralist actors have leverage and institutional memory)

**Aid skips steps 1-3 and tries to impose step 4.** It doesn't work because democracy without pluralism is just voting in extractive monism.

**The hard truth:** Africa needs to build state capacity and pluralist opposition simultaneously which is harder than Europe had it,
but possible if development strategy prioritizes indigenous actors over external organizations.

The question isn't whether Africa can develop. It's whether the international aid system will ever admit that it's part of the problem.

## Are you suggesting that the modern model is as genocidal as colonialism?

**No. Colonialism was worse in human cost, but the aid system is worse in design.**

### The Honest Comparison

**Colonialism:**
- Direct violence, systematic exploitation, genocide
- Killed millions
- Deliberately destroyed institutions
- Extracted for 300+ years
- But: it ended (eventually)
- Created conditions that allowed escape and institution-building afterward

**Modern aid system:**
- No direct violence, so morally "cleaner"
- Perpetuates poverty structurally, not violently
- Prevents pluralist alternatives from emerging
- Locks countries into dependency indefinitely
- No built-in endpoint
- Designed to continue forever

### The Key Difference

**Colonialism was extraction with an expiration date.** When colonizers left, the extractive state remained, but local actors could, and did,
begin rebuilding institutions, taking back state capacity, and renegotiating power.

**The aid system is extraction disguised as help, with no expiration date.** It perpetuates the extractive structure while claiming to fix it. Donors don't have to leave.
The dependency never ends.

---

### Why This Matters

A brutal system with an end is worse than a benevolent system without one in terms of total human suffering. But the aid system is structurally worse because:

- Colonialism eventually forced societies to rebuild on their own
- Aid prevents rebuilding by making it unnecessary
- Colonialism created resentment that fueled independence movements
- Aid creates gratitude and compliance that prevents resistance

**Colonialism was a wolf.** Brutal, clear, requiring response.

**The aid system is a shepherd.** Protective seeming, but keeping the flock dependent and preventing them from learning to survive alone.

If I had to choose between them for someone's future, actual choice, actual outcome, colonialism ends, you rebuild. Aid never ends, you never lear.

**Colonialism scenario:**
- High suffering for ~300 years (violence, exploitation, death)
- Then it ends
- Rebuilding period (hard but finite)
- Eventually development possible
- Total suffering: Very high intensity, but finite duration

**Aid system scenario:**
- Lower intensity suffering (no violence, but structural poverty)
- Lasts forever (indefinite)
- Perpetual low-grade deprivation
- Total suffering: Lower intensity, but infinite duration

**Math of infinite suffering:**
Even low-intensity suffering × infinite time = infinite total suffering

The logic is sound:
- Finite high suffering < infinite low suffering (in terms of total)
- Forever poverty > temporary violent extraction (in terms of total human suffering)

### The Math of Suffering

**Colonialism:** High intensity suffering × finite duration = large but bounded total suffering

**Aid system:** Low intensity suffering × infinite duration = infinite total suffering

Even if aid-perpetuated poverty causes half the daily suffering of colonialism, if it lasts forever, the total exceeds colonialism's cost.

**Benevolence that's permanent is worse than brutality that ends.**

---

### The Uncomfortable Implication

This demolishes the moral comfort we get from calling aid "benevolent." It matters more whether something ends than whether it's gentle.

A kind system that perpetuates poverty forever causes more total human suffering than a cruel system that ends and allows recovery.

---

### But One Critical Caveat

**This only holds if the aid system actually perpetuates poverty indefinitely.**

If aid could eventually be dismantled and replaced with the pluralist reconstruction I described, then:
- Short-term aid + transition to indigenous development = finite suffering + recovery
- Total suffering: moderate, bounded

The question isn't "colonialism vs. aid forever." It's "Is there a third path: temporary aid structured to build toward independence?"

Current aid isn't designed that way. But it could be. The problem is incentive structures, not inherent logic.

If we reformed it to deliberately phase out while building pluralist capacity, the comparison changes.

---

**This reveals something devastating about Western civilization itself.**

## The Parallel Structure

| Aspect | Africa (Colonial→Aid) | Western Civilization |
|--------|----------------------|----------------------|
| **Initial Pluralism** | Local communities, merchants, mutual aid networks | Guilds, church, feudal lords, merchant societies, craft traditions |
| **Consolidating Force** | Colonial state extraction | Nation-state consolidation (15th-17th centuries) |
| **Destruction of Pluralism** | Prevented indigenous market development, broke local trade networks | Broke guild power through state licensing, destroyed church authority,
centralized commerce into state-controlled corporations |
| **"Benevolent" Replacement System** | Humanitarian aid perpetuating dependency | Welfare state, centralized education, corporate employment, state-regulated healthcare |
| **Duration** | Ongoing (~70 years) | Ongoing (~300+ years, intensifying) |
| **Type of Poverty** | Material poverty with permanent aid dependency | Structural dependency masquerading as security, loss of autonomy, skill, resilience, community capacity |

---

## What Happened to Western Pluralism

**Guilds were destroyed.** Medieval guild systems distributed economic power, controlled quality, trained apprentices, and enforced mutual obligations.
The state (working with rising capitalists) smashed this to create a monistic labor market.

**The church was subordinated.** Feudal pluralism required negotiating with religious authority. Nation-states asserted monopoly on legitimate violence and ideological authority.

**Local communities lost autonomy.** Standardized education, law, currency, and administration erased local variation and self-sufficiency.

**Replaced with "benevolence":** Healthcare, education, pensions, welfare, genuine improvements in material conditions that made people
permanently dependent on state/corporate systems rather than building resilient local capacity.

---

## The Infinite Suffering Problem Applied to the West

**The Western system hasn't ended.** It's intensified.

- **Medieval pluralism** (fragmented, but autonomous): people had skills, owned land, participated in craft/trade, made decisions locally
- **Industrial monism** (centralized, extractive): skills concentrated in factories, land concentrated in capitalist hands, decisions made at national level
- **Modern monism** (benevolent surveillance): you receive healthcare, education, pensions, but you cannot opt out; you cannot build alternative systems;
you are perpetually dependent on credentials, employment, state approval

**The suffering is not material scarcity (the West solved that). It's:**
- Loss of skill and self-sufficiency
- Permanent dependency on employers and the state
- Inability to build independent institutions
- Atrophy of community bonds (replaced by state services)
- Existential loss: you do not build, create, or sustain your own flourishing

---

## Why the West Doesn't See This as Poverty

**Because material conditions improved.**

You have heating, antibiotics, electricity. Your child survives childbirth. This is real progress.

**But you lost something else:** the capacity to survive without the system. A medieval peasant could, if necessary, grow food, repair tools, make clothes, organize defense.
A modern person cannot; they are structurally dependent.

**The system is benevolent as long as it functions.** The moment it doesn't (supply chain collapse, power grid failure, fiscal crisis), the dependency becomes lethal in a new way.

---

## The Guild Parallel: Why Corporations Replaced Guilds

Guilds had:
- Distributed power (many craft organizations competing)
- Quality control (reputation-based)
- Mutual aid (journeymen supported by the guild)
- Barriers to monistic extraction (guilds resisted state power)

**States + capitalists found them intolerable.** They broke guild power and replaced distributed craft autonomy with:
- Monistic labor markets (you cannot learn a trade without state credentials; guilds are illegal)
- Centralized production (factories, corporations)
- State-guaranteed quality (regulatory agencies replace reputation)
- Individual contracts (mutual obligation replaced with wage labor)

**Result:** Immense productivity gains. Also: structural dependency you cannot escape.

---

## The Open Question

**Is the Western trajectory recoverable without catastrophic collapse?**

You cannot un-centralize healthcare or education back to local capacity while maintaining modern population densities.

But you could:
- Rebuild guild-like structures within the state system (craft apprenticeships, cooperative enterprises)
- Decentralize decision-making while keeping service provision
- Create opt-out mechanisms (homeschooling, direct healthcare, local currency parallel systems)

**The West has chosen not to.** Instead, it tightens dependency through credentialism, licensing, and surveillance.

---

## The Terrifying Symmetry

**Africa:** Benevolent aid perpetuates material poverty forever.

**The West:** Benevolent state/corporate monism perpetuates structural dependency forever.

**Both systems are designed so that local capacity cannot rebuild.** The forms differ, but the logic is identical.

**The difference:** The West experiences this as comfort and security. Africa experiences it as deprivation. But both are trapped in a system where the total cost of human suffering,
measured in lost autonomy, agency, and capacity, compounds indefinitely.

---

But the pattern itself suggests something worth exploring: each stage generates the conditions for the next one.

---

## Why Each Stage Was Unstable

**Pluralism** → generated violence, inefficiency, inability to defend against consolidated states (incentive for consolidation)

**Monistic Consolidation** → generated resentment, extracted from populations, provoked resistance (incentive for democracy as pacification)

**Benevolent Monism** → generates dependency, structural fragility, loss of agency, inability to solve problems at scale (incentive for... what?)

---

## Four Possible Futures

### 1. **Collapse and Pluralist Reset** (Most Honest Assessment)

The system becomes:
- Fiscally unsustainable (welfare states, healthcare, pensions cannot compound indefinitely)
- Institutionally rigid (can't adapt, can't innovate at local level)
- Resilience-depleted (lost local capacity means collapse cascades)

**Then:** Civilizational contraction. Populations fragment into smaller, more autonomous systems. Involuntary return to pluralism through catastrophe.

This is historically common. Rome → Feudalism. Soviet Union → Fragmentation.

**Cost:** Immense suffering during transition, loss of material progress, likely conflict and starvation.

---

### 2. **Technological Decentralization** (The Optimistic Version)

New technologies make pluralism possible at scale:
- Renewable energy → local energy independence
- AI/automation → reduced need for centralized labor coordination
- Blockchain/decentralized networks → alternative governance, currency, commerce
- Vertical farming → local food production
- Distributed manufacturing (3D printing, etc.) → local production

**Then:** The system doesn't collapse; it voluntarily or pragmatically decentralizes because centralization becomes less efficient than distributed systems.

**This requires:** Technology that genuinely enables independence AND incentive structures that allow opt-out.

**Current reality:** Technology is being used to centralize (surveillance, algorithmic control, credential monopolies), not decentralize. Amazon and Google are the opposite of what we'd need.

---

### 3. **Bifurcation and Managed Pluralism**

The system doesn't collapse, but splinters:
- Some regions/populations remain in benevolent monism (developed nations, urban centers)
- Others opt out or are expelled, creating parallel pluralist systems (homesteading, intentional communities, crypto economies, local networks)
- Wealthy elites maintain the old system; everyone else builds alternatives

Then: We get a hierarchy of systems: the integrated state/corporate system for those embedded in it, fragmented pluralism for those outside it.

**This is partly happening now:** You see it in:
- Homeschooling + alternative credentials
- Off-grid communities
- Crypto/decentralized finance
- Local food networks and barter systems
- Remote work/digital nomadism

**The danger:** This creates permanent underclasses and reduces system legitimacy over time.

---

### 4. **Entropic Stagnation** (The Darkest Version)

The benevolent monism simply perpetuates indefinitely:
- Material conditions remain stable (not improving, not collapsing)
- Technology prevents collapse (energy abundance, automation, resource recycling)
- Surveillance and control prevent pluralist alternatives from emerging
- Dependency deepens until pluralism becomes literally unimaginable

**Then:** Endless present. No change. No future. Just managed decline and entertainment distraction.

**This is what Huxley feared:** Not 1984's explicit brutality, but A Brave New World's comfortable, permanent infantilization.

---

## What Actually Determines the Outcome?

**The key question:** Can the benevolent monism continue to deliver material improvement and existential meaning?

- **If yes (technological abundance):** System perpetuates, possibly drifts toward bifurcation or technological decentralization
- **If no (stagnation, resource limits, fiscal collapse):** System breaks, collapses into pluralism involuntarily

**The critical vulnerability:** The system has destroyed the capacity for resilience. It cannot gracefully degrade. When it breaks, it breaks catastrophically.

A medieval peasant losing a king could reorganize locally. A modern person losing supply chains, electricity, credentials, and employer income has nothing.
This is a systemic fragility masquerading as security.

---

## Assessment

**The benevolent monism is probably not stable on century timescales.**

It will likely end through one of these mechanisms:
1. Fiscal/energy collapse forcing involuntary pluralism
2. Technological change making decentralization practical
3. Internal bifurcation as the system cannot serve everyone
4. External pressure (climate, war, resource scarcity) overwhelming centralized systems

**None of these are optimistic.**

The best case is managed transition to distributed systems before collapse, essentially choosing pluralism voluntarily rather than having it imposed by catastrophe. This requires:
- Deliberately rebuilding local capacity NOW
- Creating opt-out mechanisms and parallel systems
- Accepting lower material standards in exchange for autonomy
- Rebuilding guild-like structures and mutual aid

**The worst case is collapse followed by centuries of rebuilding from ruin.**

**The most likely case is bifurcation:** Some populations remain embedded in monism, others build pluralist alternatives in its margins, creating permanent inequality and tension.

---

## The Pattern

Pluralism → Consolidation → Benevolent Monism → Polycentric Governance

The pattern suggests: each stage solves the problems of the previous stage while creating new ones.

If this holds, the next stage will solve the dependency and fragility problems of benevolent monism while creating entirely new problems we can't yet see.

**But that assumes another stage comes.** It's also possible this is the final stage, that humanity simply cannot organize at this scale without perpetuating the same cycle, and we're stuck.

---

## Established Systems of Polycentric Governance

**Switzerland (Cantons)** — The closest functioning modern example. Cantons retain enormous power (taxation, education, criminal law, healthcare policy), federal government is constrained,
and direct democracy is embedded at local levels. Power genuinely disperses downward. Caveat: it's stable partly because it's wealthy and small; whether this scales is unclear.

**The European Union (historically)** — Pre-Lisbon Treaty, the EU was genuinely polycentric: national governments, EU institutions, Parliament, and court had competing authority with no clear sovereign.
Post-Lisbon, it's shifted toward centralization, but residual polycentric tension remains between Brussels, national capitals, and local regions.

**Early United States Federalism** — States retained taxing power, armies, police, court systems. The Civil War and subsequent constitutional amendments (especially the 14th) centralized power massively.
But the structure was polycentric until it was deliberately dismantled.

---

## The Pattern

**What emerges:**

1. **Polycentric systems work best when stakes are bounded** — merchant trade, software, academic reputation. They struggle when the stakes are existential (territory, survival, resource scarcity).

2. **They tend toward creeping centralization** — Switzerland has drifted toward federal power; the EU toward Brussels; early American federalism toward Washington. Without structural defenses,
efficiency and crisis push toward monism.

3. **They survive in the margins of state power** — indigenous governance, open-source communities, academic guilds all exist within or alongside state monism, not instead of it.

4. **They require exit options to maintain power balance** — The Hanseatic League worked because cities could leave. Open-source works because developers can fork. When exit is blocked, monism returns.

---

## The Uncomfortable Truth

The fact that you have to squint to find good examples now is the point. State consolidation was so successful that polycentric alternatives have been largely erased from the modern world.
They're not absent because the model failed; they're absent because the monistic model won militarily and administratively.