The head of the ABC has sounded the alarm over the irrepressible rise in artificial intelligence during a speech to media leaders.
Chair Kim Williams raised the issue during a keynote address at the Alliance for Journalists Freedom on Thursday.
"Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that there would soon be hordes of personalised AI assisters producing content for the world," he told the gathering in Sydney.
"Are you worried? I am."
Mr Williams said journalists trained in media ethics were often being "sidelined" in favour of views and values from completely unknown strangers and content had been created using no journalists at all.
"You don't have to be a chair to worry about what this may mean for the truth and for democracy if it is not within editorial guardrails; it's worrying," he said.
"It's silly to stand in the way of innovation but in a functional democracy, citizens need to know what they can trust."
Trusted news media outlets are struggling to remain viable as their revenues are captured by tech companies new and old as audiences move to Tiktok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and myriad others, Mr Williams added.
According to the latest survey of 47 countries by the workers Institute for study of journalism at Oxford, across the globe, the percentage of people getting their news from online platforms rather than media publishers is steadily increasing, he said.
"It's now at 72 per cent compared to 22 per cent only five years ago."
Mr Williams, the 20th Chair of the ABC and former head of rival NewsCorp, took over from Ita Buttrose in March and announced a major restructure of local news divisions.
He reversed former managing director David Anderson's digital-first strategy and elevated local audio into its own department within the organisation.
In his address, he also emphasised the critical role the national broadcaster plays in providing reliable, locally relevant news and information to regional and rural Australia.
"We're a highly urbanised nation but I think many Australians don't realise just how many of us live outside the capital cities," he said.
"Last year we activated 659 emergency events on floods, fires, tropical cyclones. Whatever the source of danger, people go to the ABC for genuinely life-saving news.
"Servicing those citizens inclusively is a very big part of what the ABC does."
At the same time, Mr Williams noted that the number of Australian newspaper journalists had almost halved between 2011 and 2023, while the diminishing number of regional news outlets was even more dire and the state of decay especially severe in Queensland.
