If you want to argue technicalities I think it depends on your frame of reference.

Relative to the galactic centre we are orbiting around it, so if a very long period of time passes, and we don’t have AGI, we certainly can be “light years away” from it.

It's a figure of speech. She's the author of the popular Murderbot series which has been a successful show on Apple+. Her stories are about artificial life and artificial intelligence.

I have to admit I also found it weird that scientific american is using a unit of distance as if it was a unit of time.

You can use a distance unit as a time unit. It's not weird.