Artificial intelligence platforms are reshaping how Australians encounter news, amplifying global media giants as local journalists, outlets and communities are pushed to the margins, new University of Sydney research has found. 

The study, by Dr Timothy Koskie from the Centre for AI, Trust and Governance in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, examined hundreds of AI-generated news summaries on Microsoft’s Copilot, discovering they 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 threatens 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 research did not examine the quality of the output or issues of misinformation and disinformation, instead focusing on which voices were loudest and which were silenced. 

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. Over half of the most referenced websites were based in the US, and 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. 

“The responses overwhelmingly foregrounded US or European sources, and alarmingly, many of the frequently listed sites had problematic backgrounds as sources of news, featuring uncertain authorship and limited transparency. In the responses where local outlets were included, the results skewed heavily toward a small handful of dominant players. 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 said. 

“The fact that Copilot not only installed itself on Windows systems without user permission as part of a phased rollout but also instructed users to use it as a news source once in the platform, while prominently featuring its own news content on MSN, is an obvious structural issue. 

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

The research highlights a critical policy gap. While Australia's News Media Bargaining Incentive acknowledges the power imbalance between tech platforms and publishers, AI-driven news generation sits outside current proposals. 

“These findings raise critical questions about whether existing mechanisms like the News Media Bargaining Incentive remain fit for purpose in an AI-mediated news environment,” Dr Koskie said. 

“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. 

“This means a decline in website traffic, undermining opportunities for revenue and audience engagement for Australian outlets in an already fraught media environment. There is no business model here for Australian journalism.” 

The curated nature of Copilot’s suggested prompts, dominated by health, science and political news, also shapes what users consider newsworthy, potentially further marginalising coverage of local issues. 

“Without intervention, Australia faces disappearing local news, fewer independent voices and a weakened democracy,” Dr Koskie said. “Yet the functionality of AI-driven news services is a design choice that can and should be regulated to serve the public interest.

"Extending the News Media Bargaining Incentive remit to consider AI tools offers a practical starting point for assessing the scale of risk and developing appropriate policy responses. One possible solution is incentivising AI companies to embed geographical location in their coding design, to ensure local sources and outlets are appearing in the generated news summaries, whether users follow suggested prompts or come up with their own." 

DECLARATION

The author received no specific grant from any public, commercial or not-for-profit agency for this research. The author has no conflicts of interest to declare. 

Hero photo: Philip Dulian/DPA/AAP.