I think this comes down to two things (which are kinda intertwined): #1: popularity of the fandom/character/etc, and #2: new/latecomers to transformative fandom who probably didn't engage with it prior to lockdown, are young, or both.
Obviously, Tenna is one of, if not *the* most popular chara(s) of the newest DR installment. So there's gonna be a lot of folks who wanna read as much stuff with him as possible, and when they run out, they'll be too impatient to wait for more. But then again, some of these people may be either too busy, inexperienced, or impatient to write stuff that they'd want to read, and AO3's infrastructure is set up so that finding people to commission fic is nigh-impossible. So they go to AI because it's the easiest way to get their """"quality"""" Tenna fic fix. And they may not see anything wrong with it because they're not as immersed in non-algorithmically-driven fandom culture, so they're missing opportunities to engage with fellow fans, not getting the full spectrum of Tenna's character or what it could be, and engaging in all the usual problems with AI in one fell swoop. It's sad, really.
EDIT: if you wanna filter out slop, sorting by comments is a good idea! That way, you'll be able to see other people's reactions and if the author is amenable to them, which can be a good way of deciding whether a story/author's worth your time or not. It also comes back to what I've been hinting at wrt. engagement.
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Obviously, Tenna is one of, if not *the* most popular chara(s) of the newest DR installment. So there's gonna be a lot of folks who wanna read as much stuff with him as possible, and when they run out, they'll be too impatient to wait for more. But then again, some of these people may be either too busy, inexperienced, or impatient to write stuff that they'd want to read, and AO3's infrastructure is set up so that finding people to commission fic is nigh-impossible. So they go to AI because it's the easiest way to get their """"quality"""" Tenna fic fix. And they may not see anything wrong with it because they're not as immersed in non-algorithmically-driven fandom culture, so they're missing opportunities to engage with fellow fans, not getting the full spectrum of Tenna's character or what it could be, and engaging in all the usual problems with AI in one fell swoop. It's sad, really.
EDIT: if you wanna filter out slop, sorting by comments is a good idea! That way, you'll be able to see other people's reactions and if the author is amenable to them, which can be a good way of deciding whether a story/author's worth your time or not. It also comes back to what I've been hinting at wrt. engagement.