Checklist · Defamation & Media Law
Pre-publication legal review checklist (including AI-generated text, images and quotes)
A pre-publication legal read covering identification, meanings, defences, court-reporting restrictions, privacy and copyright, plus specific checks for AI-assisted text, transcripts, translations and synthetic images.
- Kind
- Checklist. Steps or checks to work through and tick off.
- Where it applies
- Australia, New South Wales, European Union
- AI use
- Yellow AI can help in set ways. A lawyer checks specific points before use.
- Law stated as at
- 17 October 2026
- Status
- Maintained. Checked against the cited sources on 17 October 2026.
- Version
- 1
- Source
- Written for this library
When to use it
Use for any item that names or identifies people or businesses in a critical way, reports on court proceedings, or used AI tools in research, writing or images. It does not replace advice on a specific high-risk story.
How AI may be used
AI may flag statements about identifiable people, list candidate meanings and mark unsupported claims for the lawyer; deciding meaning, risk and defences is a lawyer task.
AI may
- Flag passages that identify people or businesses and list candidate meanings with the words relied on
- List factual claims in the draft that have no supporting document on the file
- Compare quotes in the draft with the transcript the journalist has checked against the recording
AI must not
- Must not decide what the item means, whether it is defamatory or whether a defence is available
- Must not process unpublished drafts, confidential sources or leaked documents in a tool not approved for that material
- Must not be relied on to say that an image, audio or video is genuine or synthetic
The lawyer checks
- Each defamatory meaning has evidence of truth or a defence supported by the file
- Suppression orders and identification bans were checked with the court, not only with the reporter
- Every AI-assisted fact, quote and image has a recorded human verification step
Method: how the Green, Yellow and Red levels are decided. This is guidance for planning, not legal advice.
Read the full text
The full text is for signed-in accounts. It is free. When you sign in you can:
- read the whole precedent, with its drafting notes beside it;
- copy it, or download it as a Word file or Markdown;
- add it to your firm’s knowledge base, so colleagues can find it;
- let the AI tools you connect read it from that knowledge base.
The summary, the law it rests on and the AI-use guidance above stay public. Privacy.
More in Defamation & Media Law
- Concerns notice under the uniform Defamation Acts (with UK letter-of-claim and NZ variants)
- Offer to make amends in response to a concerns notice
- Takedown demand for AI-generated deepfake or synthetic content (to poster or platform)
- Complaint notice to a digital intermediary (s 31A accessible complaints mechanism) with UK and US variants
- Newsroom and publisher generative AI and synthetic media policy
All precedents for Defamation & Media Law · Tasks and AI use in this area