# 260612 ABC News Channel 5PM — AI Reporting

Canonical source: https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/uPpmTTEPFCEIMubjIHBPSQ
Publication: CamClip
Published: 2026-06-12T07:34:22+00:00
Content role: appearance

## Transcript

Raw or automatically generated transcript. Check the linked recording before using verbatim quotations.

Ian Gillespie reporting there from Brisbane. Dozens of government bodies missed deadlines for reporting how they use artificial intelligence and nominate a single person to be in charge of its use. It was the first test of the government's plan to make agencies responsible for policing their own AI use. And while the departments have since corrected their mistakes, the lapses have prompted questions about Australia's broader approach to regulating AI. Is national AI technology reporter Cam Wilson. Last year Australia was at a crossroads. We were deciding which way we're going to go with AI regulation. One way was the EU style, where they have a central AI Act with rules in it that cover the technology's use across the whole country. The other pathway that we ended up going down was instead of doing that, we decided to give the responsibility of regulating AI use within various sectors to the government agencies that were responsible for regulating that sector overall. So instead of these one rules, you know, from the central organization, it was given to everyone to say you're the experts in your field, figure out how to use AI. Now that's obviously a different approach, and you know they bring that expertise, but there has been questions about well, you know, how are they going to understand this new technology? And so it was worth looking at how in the past they have regulated their own use of AI themselves to see just how good they are at that task. And so what did you or the ABC find about how agencies have handled this? Yeah, so around the same time, uh, the uh government agency that's responsible for administering technology across the government, which is the digital tech uh tech no digital transformation agency, um, they create a policy saying government agencies need to build up trust in themselves and how they're using this new technology. So they tasked all the agencies with disclosing how they use AI and also picking someone who's literally responsible for it, making sure that someone actually answers for it at the end of the day. And what we found was that uh dozens of these agencies out of about 90 odd uh had actually failed to do one or the other um by the first deadline that they've kind of set up in it. So this first task of saying, you know, not even like regulating outside of themselves, but literally how are you using it, they didn't meet it. Now that's not to say that they aren't using it in a safe way, but they weren't doing a great job at kind of meeting these basic expectations of explaining that, and so that makes it very hard from the outside to know how they're using it and to build that trust in their use of it. Are there possible concerning implications from this? Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that you would just like assume is that you know, if you'll say we're we've got to go one way rather than the other, and you look at how they've kind of done that similar task in the past, um, it wasn't necessarily instilling a whole lot of confidence. That being said, they have you know um met those expectations, all of them now, so they have you know remedied that, and there are new expectations, broaden expectations to give us more detail about how they are using it within the agencies. So we'll see how they go on that. Some of those deadlines are still to come, but obviously, this is an area that's so important. It's this uh you know type of technology that is very hyped, Australians don't generally have a lot of trust in it, and it's changing so quickly, and it's very technical. So it's something that people are paying a lot of attention to. So I guess we'll see how they go on the next set of deadlines. And you'll be on it. I will be. Okay, we'll leave there, Ken Wilson. Thank you.