Oh FFS, I clipped the word new. Of course it uses information in the prompt. That’s trivial. No one cares about it returning the information that was given to it in the prompt. Nevertheless, mea culpa. You got me.

this is a ship of thesseus premise here

No, it really isn’t.

The pupose of that paradox is that you unambiguously are recreating/replacing the ship exactly as you already know it is. The reason the ‘ai’ in question here is even being used is that it isn’t doing that. It’s giving you back much more than it was given.

The comparison would be if Thesues’ ship had been lost and you definitely don’t have the ship anymore, but had managed to recover the sail. If you take the sail to an experienced builder (the ai) who had never seen the ship, then he might be able to build a reasonable approximation based on inferences from the sail and his wealth of knowledge, but nobody is going to be daft enough to assert it is same ship. Does the wheel even have the same number of spokes? Does it have the same number of oars? The same weight of anchor?

The only way you could even tell if his attempted fascimile was close is if you had already intimate knowledge of the ship from some other source.

…when a heavily altered photo of something that vaugely resembles it’s original photo in most aspects, is considered to be a photo”

Disagree.