Can't we send two elephants per year? Do they even have to be elephants, or can we send plain glycine?
On a far more serious note, the day we can send just one AI system (and wait) must be just a few decades away.
So paperclips. As many as it can make.
We can request more useful constructions after it has demonstrated skill at that...
Whatever your AI could do, you could do remotely from earth (with some light lag). However, AI can't magically conjure resources like carbon.
You would also need some good robotics and production capacity, preferably able to self-replicate.
AI is great, but it's not solving the greatest current bottleneck here.
I have never seen any of those things in real life, yet journalists making stupid comparisons. I guess the field must be full of people that were deathly afraid of maths and numbers.
In regular football the spherical ball spends more time in the air than rolling, too. And in popular variants like Australian rules football or Rugby the ball is egg shaped, and that doesn't seem to cause any problems with enjoyment of these sports.