What happens when AI meets a pandemic?

In an opinion piece in The New York Times written just as the novel coronavirus pandemic was taking off in New York City, author David Brooks used the phrase "plague eyes" to describe the radically new perspective that had begun to inject itself into the consciousness of everyone facing the unprecedented health threat. One of the things worth turning those eyes toward is the challenge of accessing trustworthy information at a time when new problems call for fast and far-reaching decisions from government politicians and bureaucrats, enterprise executives, healthcare leaders, small business owners, and individual families. At the time Brooks' column was written, there was confusing and contradictory information coming out of the healthcare agencies, the Trump administration, the Chinese government, the mainstream media, the European media, and the media of the right, to name a few sources of real and alternative fact. What is clear This is what we can see clearly after some months of reading, watching, and listening to the pronouncements on the crisis from around the globe: Content challenges continue to dog AI. For example, should AI be able to create its own channel of authoritative information so that both fake-news people and alternative-facts people can access "unvarnished" truths?