It seems the term AI is now synonymous with hallucinating Large Language Models in the general publics head. There is a whole field of machine learning where you can get statistically useful results with various techniques. Alpha Fold is a good example where real progress has been made on finding protein folding solutions that older brute force algorithms are just too inefficient to explore the state space.

This paper is taking about a new ML model for classifying planetary systems that out performs previous data processing pipelines. It's called statistical validation because it is inherently a numbers game. The paper goes into lots of details about how they calculate false positive rates and compare it to previous approaches. The point is not to definitely identify individual systems but to classify the distribution of system types in the large amounts of data the modern surveys are generating.