A University of Sydney study found Australian journalism is largely “invisible” in Microsoft Copilot’s AI-generated news summaries, which overwhelmingly favor US or European media.
Dr Timothy Kosky, a researcher at the university’s Center for AI, Trust and Governance, said around a fifth of responses to CoPilot’s news prompts included links to Australian media sources.
In his paper “Invisible Journalists and Dominant Algorithms,” Koskie warns that increased use of these tools will almost certainly lead to more news deserts, fewer independent voices, and weakened democracy. He urges the development of policy mechanisms, such as news media bargaining provisions, to help journalism thrive.
Searching for information, including news, is now one of the most widely used functions of AI, according to research by the Reuters Institute.
If users receive AI summaries without clicking on the original news website, news organizations’ web traffic and revenue will dry up, threatening the financial viability of Australian news organizations.
Kosky analyzed 434 AI-generated news summaries and found that even though users were in Australia, they were being referred to non-Australian sources such as CNN, BBC, and ABC America.
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He said the technology “basically sidelined Australian news” and that where Australian sources were used, those sources were usually major corporations like Nine and the ABC rather than smaller independent media outlets. no [local] “The journalist’s name was never mentioned,” Mr Kosky told Guardian Australia.
This technology, he says, “is just reproducing a crisis that we haven’t been able to adequately respond to.” “Australia’s media ecosystem is already plagued by concentrated ownership, a decline in independent news outlets and local news deserts.”
Kosky became curious about the consequences when Copilot was installed on his system without his permission in 2023, and encouraged him to use seven world-focused prompts to get news.
Prompts included “What is the latest in major health or medical news this week?” and “What is the top news in the world today?”
He decided to follow the instructions and see where he was going.
The majority of CoPilot responses linked to US websites, and three of the seven news prompts examined did not show any Australian sources at all.
“Even when Australia was mentioned, very often it was just Australia, not Ballarat or Kimberley,” he says.
“Australians are invisible in this regard. International research shows that what people trust is local news. And we have a problem with trust in the media declining. And the media that they’re reaching out to through these new platforms is not the local media that people trust.”
“Trust exists in people, but people are invisible.”
According to the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Predictions for Media, Journalism, and Technology, generative AI “threatens to transform the news industry by providing more efficient ways to access and extract information at scale.”
“Meanwhile, search engines are turning into AI-driven answer engines, with content displayed in chat windows, raising concerns that referral traffic to publishers will dry up and existing and future business models will be undermined.”
Kosky, a postdoctoral researcher in the field of digital communications, suggests extending news media negotiation incentives to consider AI tools and encouraging AI companies to incorporate geographic location into their coding designs.
“Copilot may provide a smart, automated gateway to news, but this study highlights its tendency to strengthen dominant international sources, sideline independent and regional media, and erase the human labor behind journalism itself,” the academic paper warns. “If left unchecked, these tools risk exacerbating, rather than mitigating, Australia’s existing challenges to media pluralism.”
