TransparencyMedium
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age Removed an Opinion Article After Undisclosed Copilot Use
- Occurred
- May 31, 2026
- Published
- Jun 3, 2026
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age removed an opinion article by Western Sydney University academic Cath Ellis after reporting found it had been prepared with Microsoft Copilot without the masthead being informed. Ellis said she used Copilot to structure her own notes, while the masthead said the article did not meet its editorial standards on AI use.
Developers
- Microsoft
- Chatbot developers
- Large language model developers
Deployers
- Cath Ellis
- Western Sydney University
- Educational communities
Harmed parties
- The Sydney Morning Herald
- The Age
- Epistemic integrity
- Educational communities
- Journalistic integrity
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: Article removed due to undisclosed AI use, violating editorial standards on transparency.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8