Artificial intelligence is leaving Australian news sources “increasingly invisible” as algorithms favour international media giants over local journalism, a new study has found.
Authored by Timothy Koskie from the University of Sydney’s Centre for AI, Trust and Governance, the study focused on outputs from Microsoft’s Copilot – an AI assistant baked into modern installations of Windows by default.
Across 434 AI-generated news summaries, the research found Copilot “systematically favoured international outlets over Australian sources”.
Using seven different prompts which were recommended by Copilot itself (including “‘what are the major health or medical news updates for this week” and “what are the top global news stories today”), only roughly one in five responses featured links to Australian media.
The majority of responses linked to US-based websites, while three of the seven prompts yielded no Australian sources whatsoever.
“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,” USYD wrote.
Though Koskie did not study other platforms under his academic investigation, he told Information Age some “preliminary work” indicated there was a “lot of consistency” across other large language models (LLMs).
“Results are coming back very similar,” said Koskie.
Microsoft did not respond prior to publication when asked whether the results accurately represented Copilot.
Not even a byline
USYD said Copilot further erased the “journalists and newsrooms that produced the stories” in its news summaries.
Indeed, Koskie found journalists were “almost never named” — instead, they were homogenised with generic references such as “researchers” or experts”.
And when local outlets did appear in Copilot’s responses, the results “skewed heavily” toward a small handful of dominant players.
Further, Australian regions and local communities were “rarely mentioned”, risking a loss of “local context”.
Koskie also took issue with the fact that Copilot “not only installed itself on Windows systems without user permission” as part of its phased rollout in recent years, but also “instructed users to use it as a news source once in the platform”.
“[Doing this] while prominently featuring its own news content on MSN, is an obvious structural issue,” he said.
While Koskie’s paper did not examine the quality of the output or issues of misinformation and disinformation, in October, a multi-nation study headed by the BBC and co-ordinated by the European Broadcasting Union found AI assistants misrepresented news content 45 per cent of the time.
With professional journalists in the study having evaluated more than 3,000 responses from such AI platforms as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity, a further 31 per cent of responses showed “serious sourcing problems”, including missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
AI bleeding the golden goose
USYD said the research highlighted a “critical policy gap” – despite Australia’s News Media Bargaining Incentive putting pressure on large tech companies to sign content deals with domestic news publishers, AI-driven news generation sits outside the government’s current proposals.
Indeed, Koskie said his findings raised “critical questions” on whether Australia’s existing mechanisms remained fit for purpose in an AI-mediated news environment.
With news summaries such as Copilot’s seemingly favouring international sources, those Australian links that do “happen to appear” were also unlikely to be clicked given readers had already “consumed the news” via a summarised output.
For publishers that rely on revenue and audience engagement, this could mean a “decline in website traffic” – meanwhile, Koskie told Information Age the “foundation of LLMs is, in many ways, the broad range of existing content across the Internet”.
Notably, other summarisation features such as Google Search’s AI Overviews have been accused of slashing web traffic amid global declines in online news audiences.
“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,” said Koskie.
“Without intervention, Australia faces disappearing local news, fewer independent voices and a weakened democracy.”
