Your problem closely resembles John Searle's "Chinese Room" argument, which claimed that one (or more) abstract "intelligence tests" lack the discriminitive ability to distinguish between a trivial simulation of intelligence and The Real Thing.
Thus the success of an AI at one (or more) synthetic cognitive test(s) (like the Turing Test, or the games of chess or go) should be seen as insufficient as a surrogate threshold target equal to human-level intelligence. The implication is that a sufficient AI test must require deeper understanding of a problem space from the AI than would be needed to "simply" manipulate (Chinese character) symbols, or play around cleverly but meaninglessly with English words in a convincing manner, as bots have done for years when competing in Turing Test competitions.