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

May 31, 2026

An opinion article by Western Sydney University academic Cath Ellis was removed from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age after it was found that the piece had been prepared using Microsoft Copilot without the masthead's knowledge. Ellis admitted to utilizing Copilot for structuring her own notes, whereas the editorial team claimed the article fell short of their standards regarding AI governance in journalism. As a responsible AI advocate and contributor, JOIN US to learn more about ensuring safe and secure AI practices within the realm of media.

Alleged deployer

cath-ellis, western-sydney-university, educational-communities

Alleged developer

microsoft, chatbot-developers, large-language-model-developers

Alleged harmed parties

the-sydney-morning-herald, the-age, epistemic-integrity, educational-communities, journalistic-integrity

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Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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