Artificial intelligence is making it easier to spread large volumes of misleading or harmful information, while also reshaping fields such as healthcare, Fei-Fei Li, co-founder of World Labs and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, said on Sunday.
She shared her stories at a discussion themed "On the Eve of the Explosion of Spatial Intelligence" during the 2025 T-EDGE Conference with Jany Hejuan Zhao, founder and chief executive of NextFin.AI and chair and chief executive of TMTPost Group.
Li said AI has significantly lowered the cost and effort required to produce and distribute content at scale."In the past, someone with bad intentions would have had to write content themselves or hire people to do it," Li said. "Now they can press a button and generate thousands or even tens of thousands of pieces instantly."
Li said she had initially been unaware that some recent online content linked to her had been generated or amplified using AI tools.
"AI genuinely empowers harmful behavior as well," she said. Li also spoke about her family background, describing her upbringing as modest and shaped by hardship.
"My family was very ordinary and quite small," she said. "My mother was in very poor health, and there were constant survival pressures when I was young."
She said those early experiences helped build resilience and shaped her perspective as a scientist working in highly technical fields.
"My work is very machine-oriented — algorithms, data, computers," Li said. "But life experiences gave me a deep understanding of human vulnerability."
Li said her long involvement in caring for her mother through illness led her to engage deeply with healthcare research, including how artificial intelligence can support medical systems.
"I spent decades navigating the healthcare system with my mother," she said. "That gave me a very different understanding of how hospitals actually work and where the pain points are."
She said this background helped her collaborate more effectively with medical professionals.
"They feel that I respect their work because I understand their reality," she said.
Zhao said Li's experience reflected how personal hardship can shape professional direction.
"Long illness makes a doctor," Zhao said, using a Chinese proverb meaning that prolonged exposure to illness builds medical understanding.
Li said her work in healthcare was driven less by abstract curiosity and more by personal motivation. "This was driven by love," she said. "I wanted my mother to survive and live better. That's what pushed me."
She added that the combination of technical training and human experience had given her a perspective she considers rare in the AI field. "There are no paths wasted in life," Li said.
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