The Sydney Morning Herald has retracted an opinion piece written by an academic urging students not to “outsource [their] thinking” to artificial intelligence after it emerged the article itself had been written by AI.

Nine newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age last week published an opinion piece by Western Sydney University pro vice-chancellor for quality and integrity Professor Cath Ellis.

The piece was a response to an article by academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert which questioned the validity of university degrees when AI usage has become so widespread.

In response, Ellis submitted a piece to the same media sites which admitted the issues around AI use in higher education was “real”, but that people should still be encouraged to go to university.

“Don’t cut corners,” Ellis’s opinion piece said.

“Don’t outsource your thinking, however tempting that may be. If the system is as fragile as some claim, then genuine effort will not be hidden. It will stand out.”

But the article was fed into AI detection platform Pangram by rival publication The Guardian, which determined it had been AI generated.

With or by?

A Western Sydney University spokesperson confirmed that AI had been used in the process of writing the article, while Ellis said it was written “with” AI, rather than “by” AI.

“To write her opinion article, Prof Ellis uploaded 40,000 words of her own original materials into a Copilot Large Language Model,” the university spokesperson said.

“The model summarised her extensive base of knowledge, providing prompts.

“This was the basis of the early drafts, reflecting Prof Ellis’s own thinking, ideas and opinions built up over more than a decade of dedicated work as a global leader in this field.”

The university spokesperson said this “demonstrates a sophisticated and appropriate” use of AI.

“Programs like Pangram can detect AI use, but they cannot determine whether that use was appropriate or inappropriate,” they said.

“The university believes the AI use in this case was appropriate.”

Nine’s editorial guidelines for its writers says that AI tools can be used during the research process and to help with ideas, but “will not be used to write stories for publication”.

It says that if AI-generated material is published, it will be clearly labelled.

Ellis’s article did not include a declaration that AI was used in the process of writing it.

The Sydney Morning Herald published its own article revealing that the opinion piece “was itself written with AI”.

The article said that a group chat filled with academics on WhatsApp had also flagged concerns that the article was written with AI, with one person saying they knew as soon as they read its first paragraph.

It also quotes Sydney Morning Herald editor Jordan Baker.

“The Herald was not informed of the use of AI in the compilation of the article by either the author or Western Sydney University,” Baker said.

“Clearly this is unacceptable and we are investigating further.”

The perils of AI use

Ellis is also quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald article, denying that the article was written “by” AI.

“It was written with AI, and there’s a really big difference there,” Ellis said.

The academic said that she had come up with the initial idea for the article while on public transport and had then used Copilot to put this into a coherent structure.

“I think of it very much as a sort of member of my team,” she said.

“I really do feel that it’s allowed me to focus more of my time and energy on what really matters, which is the ideas, the thinking…rather than spending a lot of my time writing sentences from scratch.”

She said that if she had known about Nine’s editorial policies, she would not have submitted the op-ed.

Western Sydney University is one of many Australian universities that have embraced AI and encouraged its students and academics to use it.

In late 2024, the University of Sydney became one of the first to allow the use of AI during some assessments, as part of a “sector-leading” policy.