Artificial Intelligence Policy Tracker

AI incident ·

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age Removed an Opinion Article After Undisclosed Copilot Use

1 news report Snapshot 7 Sep 2026
On this page 6 sections

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 reportJun 2026

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 on record for this risk area

No instrument on record yet covers this risk area where it happened. See the open queue.

Matched from the record's risk category and country to the instruments in effect recorded here: a law listed covers the area, which is not a finding that it applies to this incident. 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 harmed party
The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Epistemic Integrity, Educational Communities, Journalistic Integrity

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

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Source record: incident #1512 on the AI Incident Database · all 1 report