Well duh! If life exists elsewhere, it almost has to be discovered by AI, unless they are also visiting us. No human is going to search millions of places and also know what to look for. New and novel signals, that machine learning can assist in bringing to human attention. Humans may confirm life, but AI will find the interesting stuff to look at.
AI has already found alien life, or maybe one of the Mars rovers has. They're throwing these articles out to get some memes into people's brains so it's easier to accept the evidence. I suspect this effort will fail given how tenacious Young Earth Creationism has been for the last 100 years.