An Australian-born Stanford University professor whose work was foundational in the creation of generative AI – popularised by ChatGPT – has warned that it will inevitably lead to a boom in misinformation, but cautioned regulators against acting too early and stifling innovation.

Queensland-born Christopher Manning is one of the world’s most highly regarded natural language processing experts and is part of a group of academics from Stanford who are considered among the foremost experts in the field (a branch of artificial intelligence centred on giving computers the ability to understand text and spoken words in a similar way to humans).