How does the existence of the universe serve as anything other than proof that the universe itself exists?

It's like somebody pointing at a random rock and claiming that because it's there, a leprechaun must have put it there.

Not necessarily, something that overt would be obvious and avoided. I'm pretty sure that what they're looking for is more for subtle biases caused by bad datasets to train the AI.

For instance, you train the AI and tell it which candidates are good or bad. But maybe, by pure happenstance, the best candidates in your dataset are all male. If so, the AI might be accidentally trained to believe that all good candidates are male.