While AI was used to detect and warn people about the latest pandemic, the same technology could lead to the spread of misinformation if the proper guardrails aren't in place, the founder of a Canadian company that was among the first to detect COVID-19 says.

Large language models (LLMs), essentially an algorithm that can take massive sets of data to predict and generate text, can be subject to “hallucination” or making stuff up, Khan warned.

“We need to create … some guardrails around it, because as you can imagine, LLMs could amplify misinformation and that doesn’t help us,” he said.