Ah that makes more sense, I couldn't make the connection!

So on "So I fully agree that clarity about "how close" matters when that’s the claim. I’m just suggesting that in some projects, closeness to the original isn’t always the most informative metric." reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

That being said as OP titled " I used AI to recreate X" then I would still argue that the audience has now expectation that whatever OP created, regardless of why and how, should be relatively close to X. If people are expert on X then they can probably figure out quite quickly if it is for them "close enough" but for others it's very hard.