"Personally I can give you a formal definition of intelligence and even a number of speculative sketches of how I think it could be implemented, but I will also tell you that strong AI is not within sight and that recent advances are not moving us in the direction of strong AI"

Tools that assist in knowledge work can be very useful and very impactful on the knowledge industries without needing to even define "strong AI", let alone "being smart", "knowing ideas", et al.

What's important is not what we call these things or how we talk about what they do in an abstract manner rather if these tools are useful.

There's a general lesson here: Don't waste your time talking yourself in philosophical circles about what "AI" means, or what "knowing" means, or what "ideas" mean. If you'd like further convincing please see Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein. If pressed I'm just going to do a cheap imitation so you might as well get it from the source.

Personally, I have found ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Copilot, and a number of other large language models and tools built on large language models to be very useful.

I fed a folk song I was working on into ChatGPT and asked it to conjure up some similar evocative scenery... I then generated animations with Stable Diffusion based on a linear interpolation between those descriptions of that evocative scenery in the latent space... Then I wrote wrote some more lyrics about the weird stuff Stable Diffusion was hallucinating... and in the end I had a bunch of visual images, a song, and some animations, all that seem worthy of publishing. The visual components would never have been made as I don't have the time or money to do much more than sit around with my acoustic guitar and write songs.