AI incident #1512 ·
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age Removed an Opinion Article After Undisclosed Copilot Use
What happened
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age removed an opinion article by Western Sydney University academic Cath Ellis after reporting found it had been prepared with Microsoft Copilot without the masthead being informed. Ellis said she used Copilot to structure her own notes, while the masthead said the article did not meet its editorial standards on AI use.
Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.
News reports (1)
Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Cath Ellis, Western Sydney University, Educational Communities
- Alleged developer
- Microsoft, Chatbot Developers, Large Language Model Developers
- Alleged harmed party
- The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Epistemic Integrity, Educational Communities, Journalistic Integrity
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
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- Risk subdomain
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- Causal entity
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- Intent
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- Timing
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