Is AI making Australian news invisible?

As Artificial Intelligence platforms continue to reshape how Australians discover news, a new warning bell’s been sounded.

As we know, AI is already seeping into radio news bulletins, via cloned voices and automated scriptwriting and story selection.

Now, it’s also amplifying global media giants as local journalists.

That’s according to Dr Timothy Koskie from the University of Sydney – who examined hundreds of AI-generated news summaries on Microsoft’s Copilot, a text-generating, AI-powered assistant often used for content creation in radio.

It was found these summaries systematically favoured international outlets over Australian sources, while erasing the journalists and newsrooms that produced the stories.

“AI-generated news summaries may offer a sleek, automated gateway to information, but in reality they’re deepening existing inequalities in the Australian media ecosystem,” Dr Koskie said.

“AI is preferencing dominant international sources and sidelining independent and regional media, silencing journalists in the process.” 

Dr Koskie warned if the AI platforms were left unchecked, the erosion of local journalism will threaten Australia’s democratic foundations and public discourse.

“Governments in Australia and around the world need to recognise local news production as essential democratic infrastructure, and work with AI companies to ensure their citizens remain informed on local affairs and voices.” 

Dr Koskie analysed 434 AI-generated news summaries produced by Microsoft Copilot for an Australian user, using seven globally focused prompts recommended by the platform itself, including ‘what are the major health or medical news updates for this week?’ and ‘what are the top global news stories today?’

The study found that, despite operating on Australian systems and being tagged to an Australian location, the majority of Copilot’s outputs favoured and hyperlinked to US or European sources, with only roughly one fifth of responses featuring links to Australian media.

In three of the seven news prompts studied, no Australian sources appeared at all.

“The most obvious pattern from the study was that AI generated outputs were replicating and exacerbating existing power imbalances in the Australian media ecosystem, such as concentration of ownership, access to local and regional news, media sustainability and diversity of content,” Dr Koskie said.

“What is clear is that AI platforms are behaving like global news aggregators, that inherit the structural biases of the internet and then intensify them.” 

AI-generated news summaries were also shown to erase the people and the places behind the news.

“Journalists are almost never named, instead homogenised as ‘researchers’ or ‘experts’, and Australia’s regions and local communities are rarely mentioned, so local context is lost,” Dr Koskie observed.

“This is a purely one-way relationship Australian journalism cannot compete with, and conceivably a pretty clear abuse of power,” he said.

Dr Koskie warns the Australian media landscape is already struggling with concentrated ownership, declining independent outlets and ‘news deserts’ in regional areas.

“AI news summaries favour international sources over local journalism, and if Australian links do happen to appear, readers have already consumed the news and are unlikely to click through to the original source. 

Dr Koskie said there is no business model here for Australian journalism.

“Without intervention, Australia faces disappearing local news, fewer independent voices and a weakened democracy.”

This article is brought to you by Radio Release.