Begs the question, what is intelligent behavior? Most of the time I see pretty anthropocentric interpretations of this (which are often well-reasoned) but there has to be some degree of definition that we can agree to as a starting point.
My current view is one of consciousness operating on a spectrum, some animals/creatures/entities are "more aware"[1] than others but then you have to ask whether that just leads to consciousness being a useful phenomenon for interaction with other creatures or if it's something more meaningful. Were humans conscious before the invention of language?
Another aspect of this is if "Chat-GPT" isn't conscious it kind of proves your dog is right? You're saying language/interaction isn't that big of a deal, and so it's based on biology. Not a lot different between a cat and a person if you really take a step back, let alone a chimpanzee and a person. Or maybe we're all not conscious at all in the sense that we mean it. I.e. it's just a useful illusion/delusion and evolutionary adaptation for cooperative behavior.
Then we have to insert free will, determinism, etc.
The whole thing is a mess. Most likely we're not conscious at all, nor do we have free will, as typically described. But we're conscious in that we're perceiving and our body as a whole has some amount of degrees of freedom to operate, but we're not special. Maybe that's scary idk.
[1] Whatever that means