New research from the University of Sydney has found that AI platforms have reshaped the way that Australian readers encounter news, amplifying global media giants while local journalists and publications are pushed to the margins.
The study by Dr Timothy Koskie from the university’s Centre for AI, Trust and Governance examined hundreds of AI-generated news summaries on Microsoft’s Copilot.
It found that the summaries systematically favoured international outlets over Australian sources, all the while erasing the journalists and newsrooms that produced the stories.
Dr Koskie makes the point that while AI-generated news summaries offer a sleek, automated gateway to information, in reality they deepen the existing inequalities in Australian media.
“AI is preferencing dominant international sources and sidelining independent and regional media, silencing journalists in the process,” he said.
As the editorial director of an Australian publication that regularly publishes original stories that can’t be found elsewhere, I can tell you it is not uncommon to see our exclusive work appear in these summaries without attribution and without a link to the source.
You don’t have to be a university researcher to know that AI is having a negative impact on trusted, independent media.
But this study does provide evidence, and that evidence says that Australian stories and trusted Australian voices are harder to find. We are grateful that the study was conducted.
When InnovationAus.com introduced its paywall a couple of years ago, it was meant as a commonsense, minimalist way to protect ourselves from AI scraping.
The paywall also opened a revenue stream to fund our reporters, and to help underwrite what we hope is a positive contribution to Australia’s technology and innovation policy conversation.
Some readers may have noticed some changes to the terms and conditions of our subscriber licences. I wanted to take a moment to explain what these changes are.
For subscribers with a single reader licence, there are no changes. We are grateful to have you on board. Please let us know how we can improve what we do, feedback is gold.
For larger organisations, you will notice that we no longer accept alias email addresses as a single user licence for the organisation.
What we have found is that large organisations – including government departments and agencies – use a single media@-style address be monitor and distribute coverage across the whole organisation.
In some cases we have seen government departments with more than 5,000 staff use a single $250 annual subscription used by many, many different devices and IP addresses to access relevant stories on InnovationAus.com.
We have asked these organisations to move to either multi-user licences, or where appropriate to a site licence. This is a polite ask that you engage with us to find a more appropriate multi-licence option.
One of department, which we report on regularly in our news coverage, spends more than $500,000 a year on external media monitoring services. And then use a single-ready licence to distribute our work to relevant divisions and branches. This is not reasonable, nor legal.
We’re not singling out the public sector here. There are similar issues with billion-dollar companies (and the odd trillion-dollar company), industry associations, public relations agencies and others.
We have been getting in touch with these organisations over the past few weeks to find ways to bring their licensing arrangements back in line with copyright norms.
At InnovationAus.com, we love our work and we love our jobs. And want to keep the work coming.
If we have contacted you in recent days about a subscription issue, it’s not because we don’t love you. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We love you so much we want you to keep reading, by helping you meet the basic obligations of the copyright system.
Between AI platforms scraping and large-scale organisations playing fast and loose with other people’s copyrighted work, something has got to give.
InnovationAus.com set up shop in 2015 to tell Australian stories and to report on the Australian tech and innovation community. We hope we can continue to do this.
If you have any queries about our multi-reader licences or site licences, please get in touch at [email protected]
Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.