There are a lot of ways to answer the question which is why you my get a bit confused when reading different people's views.
For one thing "ape" is not necessarily a precisely defined term. It is just a colloquial expression that, most of the time, refers to a particular group of old world, tailless primates. Some people separate off the "great apes" from other apes. So "great apes" include chimps, bonoboos, gorillas and orangutans but not baboons. Some people include humans in the "great ape" group and some don't. (Certainly, there are good genetic and anatomical arguments to be made that we should be included but that general usage may trump that).
Since the term "ape" is fuzzy you could allow it to include a lot of extinct primates as well as modern man. So if we are "apes" so are H. erectus. And likewise so, perhaps, you could define the autralipithicines (Lucy) as an "ape" too. If you do that then we are decended from apes by definition.
However, what must always be made clear is that we are, no matter how you define things, NOT decended from modern animals like a chimp, gorilla or what have you. In that sense saying we are descended from apes is ALWAYS WRONG. And, most often, a person making such a statement only thinks of apes as being chimps and gorillas so they are wrong in what they say.
However, if you define "ape" to mean primate of some kind or another including all extinct forms then, by defnition, of course we are descended from an "ape".
What is actually the case when you attempt to avoid using poorly defined terms like "ape" is that we AND the extant other primates are all descended from some common ancestors. Chimps and we shared one about 6 million years ago. That common ancestor was NOT a chimp and was not a modern human.
To our uneducated eyes we might, if we saw one in the forest, think of it as being more chimp like than human like (it was probably pretty hairy for one thing). And even to an expert it may be anatomically a bit closer to a chimp since we have reason to believe that the line leading to humans has undergone more change than that leading to chimps in the time frame involved (not all lineages have to evolve at the same rate).
However, it might also have been a lot less chimp like that we might think at first glance. We don't have specimens of the last common ancestor ( I don't think) but there is reason to speculate that it may have been a bit more upright than modern chimps are for example.
Generally the likes of AIG use "Ape" to mean chimps or gorillas. We definitely did NOT evolve from a creature that was such an animal. How much like them it was is a subject for the experts to argue over. I'd guess it was somewhat more like them than like us. Instead of being exactly as different from us as from them I would make an uneducated guess and say it was 30% different from chimps and 60% different from us.
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