AI incident ·
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age Removed an Opinion Article After Undisclosed Copilot Use
In brief
An AI system built by Microsoft, Chatbot Developers and 1 other and deployed by Cath Ellis, Western Sydney University and 1 other allegedly harmed The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and 3 others.
- Risk domain
- Not classified
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 1 report
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.
Laws that address this harm
No recorded instrument yet addresses this use case where it happened. See the open queue.
Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (1)
Titles link to the original publisher; report 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)
- Risk domain
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- Risk subdomain
- —
- Causal entity
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- Intent
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- Timing
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- Harm level
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- Sectors
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- Countries
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Source record: incident #1512 on the AI Incident Database · all 1 report