What makes the current AI art saturation different from earlier waves of controversy is that the damage is operational, not merely symbolic. Fan communities depend on search and discovery to sustain themselves — the ability to find human-made art, share it, and build collective investment around a work. When that infrastructure is overwhelmed by AI-generated images, the community's connective tissue tears, not because of any single actor's malice but because of the aggregate volume produced by many actors operating independently . The harm is structural and cumulative, which is precisely…