In a recent Australian Financial Review opinion piece, “There is nothing creative about AI not paying for news content”, Rod Sims made a point Australia cannot afford to ignore.
Sims is now chair of The Superpower Institute and an Enterprise Professor at the Melbourne Institute at the University of Melbourne. He is also the former chair of the ACCC, and when he warns about market power and unfair extraction, people should listen.
His point is blunt, and correct. There is nothing creative about AI companies taking professionally created content, building commercial products on top of it, and then refusing to properly pay the people who made that content in the first place. That applies most urgently to journalism, but it also reaches writers, photographers, artists and other creators whose work is being vacuumed up to make these systems more useful and more profitable.
That is not innovation. It is extraction.
And for regional Australia, the damage will be greater than it is in the cities.
In a capital city, people may still have a range of big media outlets, institutions and voices competing to keep public life under scrutiny. In regional Australia and local areas, the local paper is often the trusted source. It is the paper that covers the council meeting, the court matter, the hospital issue, the fire warning, the local business, the sporting club and the decisions that shape daily life.
If that journalism weakens, country communities feel it first.
That is why the Canadian research on this issue is so important. The study is called AI News Audit. It was published in March 2026 by Taylor Owen and Aengus Bridgman of McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy and the Media Ecosystem Observatory. It is some of the clearest evidence yet of what AI companies are actually doing with professionally produced news content.
The researchers found AI models had absorbed Canadian journalism at scale and usually did not say so. In the technical brief, the researchers found that among knowledgeable responses, 92 per cent provided no source attribution at all. In the policy brief, they found AI systems gave no source attribution 82 per cent of the time, and when asked about specific recent articles, produced substitute answers in 54 to 81 per cent of cases while naming the original outlet in the response text only one to 16 per cent of the time.
That is the heart of the problem.
The journalism is being used. The value is being captured. The source is being erased.
AI companies do not send reporters to council meetings. They do not sit through court hearings. They do not verify facts during floods, fires or elections. They do not employ the local journalist, the editor, the photographer or the creator who actually did the original work. But they increasingly want to scrape that work, absorb it into their systems, and profit from it as if it were their own.
For regional and suburban Australia, that is not some distant policy debate. It goes to whether local journalism survives.
The Canadian research also found that the outlets getting the most AI visibility were the biggest, free, nationally prominent organisations, while paywalled and regional and local publishers fell well below proportional representation. That should ring alarm bells here. It means smaller publishers can be mined for value while losing the audience and revenue they need to keep reporting.
And the consequences go well beyond business.
We are already living through an era of misinformation, half-truths and outright falsehoods spreading across social media at extraordinary speed. Much of it is unchecked. Much of it is designed to inflame, divide and mislead. If AI systems now scrape reliable journalism, strip out the source, and serve up confident answers that people cannot easily verify, the danger only grows. The Canadian policy brief warns that when AI delivers answers drawn from journalism but stripped of source and context, the public’s ability to judge reliability is diminished.
That is a direct threat to democracy.
Democracy depends on trusted, checkable and accountable information. People need to know where a fact came from. They need to be able to judge the source, test its credibility and read further for themselves. If AI becomes a black box that swallows journalism and other original creative work, then spits out unattributed answers, the public loses one of its most important safeguards.
Australia should be clear about this. If AI companies want to use local journalism and other professionally created content, they should pay for it. If they use original reporting and creative work to build commercial products, they should compensate the people and businesses that created that value. And if they rely on trusted journalism to make their systems useful, they should be required to clearly identify the source so readers can verify what they are being told.
That is not anti-technology. It is pro-fairness, pro-creativity and pro-democracy.
Rod Sims is right. There is nothing creative about not paying for news content. And in regional Australia, there is nothing abstract about the consequences. When local journalism is stripped for value and not sustained, it is our towns, our readers and our democracy that pay the price.
* Paul Thomas is co-owner and managing director of Star News Group, Today News Group and SA Today. He is a past president and life member of Country Press Australia.
