You started off defining intelligence as something limited and not independently useful, and then you concluded that its presence was limited and not independen

You started off defining intelligence as something limited and not independently useful, and then you concluded that its presence was limited and not independently useful. The answer is that it's not actually obvious that "intelligence and imagination could not be more separate" or that "imagination is...essentially human in nature," so when most people talk about AI, they are not excluding those abilities.