Gabrielle Boyle resigned from the AFL three days before Microsoftโs AI assistant was switched on throughout the organisation.
She had asked whether she could opt out. The AFL told her, in writing, that she could not.
โYou do not have a right to request that your work not be accessed by our AI systems,โ the codeโs HR executive Ciara Gilchrist wrote to her on June 23 according to documents seen by this masthead.
Boyle sent her resignation on June 26. Microsoftโs Copilot went live on June 29.
From her Coffs Harbour base, Boyle was the AFLโs participation manager for northern NSW, responsible for getting five to 12-year-olds to play football in the Hunter region, the North Coast and the central and north-west. She describes herself as an AI refuser who will not use ChatGPT, Copilot or any other large language model.
Her objections run from the immediate to the apocalyptic: the water and power consumed by data centres, what the technology is doing to peopleโs capacity to think, and research suggesting advanced AI could pose a risk of human extinction.
Boyle is an outlier, and knows it. She no longer owns a smartphone, has deleted her social media accounts and now lives in a converted Toyota 4WD.
The AFLโs refusal to allow Boyle a choice is not unlawful. Employers in Australia can install software on the equipment they own, are exempt from privacy law when handling employee records, and generally own whatever their staff produce. Most workers accept AI at work, or accept that they have no realistic way to avoid it.
Boyleโs case, illustrating how far someone has to go if they really donโt want to use the technology, is also early test of a new feature of many Australian workplaces.
As employers embed AI into the systems their staff use daily, often at short notice and with no option to decline, the law has not caught up. In a recent survey of Australian Services Union members, who often work in clerical roles, more than half were not aware their employer had an AI policy at all.
Boyleโs departure caps a four-month exchange with the AFL, documented in emails seen by this masthead, that began with an internal staff survey.
About 35 per cent of AFL staff said in a survey last year that they were not comfortable with AI being adopted in the workplace.
Boyle raised her concerns at an executive roadshow when the leadership team, including chief executive Andrew Dillon, visited Coffs Harbour on March 5. She asked what the AFLโs position on AI was and whether a policy would arrive to protect data and jobs.
Bec Haagsma, the AFLโs executive general manager customer, commercial and technology, fielded the question and spoke positively about AIโs potential to improve both the elite game and the AFLโs administration. Boyle says about eight colleagues thanked her for speaking up when she got back to the office.
She followed up in writing to Haagsma, setting out research on AIโs labour market and extinction risks and asking the league to pause its adoption.
Meanwhile, on March 16, Boyle emailed to report that a trainee planned to tidy up a list of registered AFL program participants by putting it through an AI tool. The list held childrenโs personal details, drawn from PlayHQ, the platform community clubs use to register players. No AI policy existed at the time.
โSharing detailed personal information of our registered participants to third-party AI companies seems like it would be in breach of their privacy,โ she wrote.
The AFLโs AI policy was released that day. It bars uploading personal or confidential information into unapproved tools, sets rules for AI meeting transcription and lists endorsed products including ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Salesforce Agentforce, Cursor and Claude Code. Its stated aspiration is to โembrace AI to elevate our peopleโs performance and impactโ.
A footnote records that the policy was written with the assistance of generative AI.
Haagsma replied to Boyleโs broader concerns the following day, saying the AFL had to do more to share its plans transparently. She invited Boyle to join an AI community of interest that was about to launch.
Boyle says that group never eventuated.
The organisationโs first national AI training session came on April 21 with more than 300 staff joining a call titled Making Sense of AI, run by an external provider. Boyle says the facilitator told staff to give their AI assistants human names, rejecting suggestions like โChattyโ as insufficiently human, and to have the AI generate pictures of them.
By mid-June, Boyle had told her managers she would not have Copilot on her laptop, would not put her work through AI systems and would not direct her team to use it. She wrote that the change was causing her significant distress and that she felt unsafe at work.
The AFLโs response was that compliance with the policy was expected of everyone and that failure to comply โmay result in performance managementโ. It declined her request for a mutual separation and disputed her recollection that she had been told to resign.
The AFL also gave her a technical answer. Copilot, its technology team explained, can only see files and emails Boyle could already open herself. It doesnโt give anyone new access to anything, the AFLโs information stays on the AFLโs own systems, and none of it is used to train Microsoftโs models.
โAFLโs position is that it is not meaningfully distinct from any other form of email or work surveillance that already occurs,โ HR executive Gilchrist wrote.
An AFL spokesman said the league recognised the opportunities AI presented and supported its responsible use โto enhance the way we workโ.
โWe also respect that some may hold different views on the adoption of new technology and thatโs OK too,โ the spokesman told this masthead.
Staff were given less than two weeksโ notice of the rollout. ACTU assistant secretary Joseph Mitchell said employers do not get to make that call alone.
โEmployers have an obligation under the Fair Work Act to consult with workers when they decide to adopt AI, where it is likely to change employeesโ jobs or how they do them,โ he told this masthead. โFailure to engage in such meaningful consultation requirements breaches an employerโs responsibilities under the Act.โ
That obligation is triggered, however, only where a change is likely to have significant effects on staff, such as job losses or changed hours. And where the duty applies, an employer must tell affected staff about the decision in writing and genuinely consider their views before acting. It does not give anyone a veto.
โEmployers have an obligation under the Fair Work Act to consult with workers when they decide to adopt AI, where it is likely to change employeesโ jobs or how they do them.โ
ACTU Assistant Secretary Joseph Mitchell
Australian Services Union national secretary Emeline Gaske said the AFLโs technical defence misses what has actually changed.
โTechnology is changing so rapidly that the question of whether a specific tool is technically confined to a workerโs existing permissions is beside the point,โ she told this masthead. โThese tools are fundamentally changing how workersโ day-to-day output is being captured, reviewed and judged.โ
Gaske said cases such as Boyleโs would keep landing in a grey zone until the law changed, with employers arguing what they were doing was lawful even where it infringed workersโ privacy. The union wants enforceable safeguards and genuine worker consultation before AI is deployed.
Boyle approached her union, the Fair Work Commission and LawAccess NSW. All three told her they could not help.
Tom Sulston, head of policy at Digital Rights Watch, said her position was close to legally hopeless. Employers have an exemption under privacy law covering employee records, and employment contracts typically give the employer ownership of what a worker produces.
โWe canโt put the onus on individuals to opt out,โ Sulston said. โIndividual opt-outs wonโt stop situations where employees are training the AI systems that will eventually replace them.โ
Four months before the rollout, NSW legislated in this area. The Work Health and Safety Amendment (Digital Work Systems) Act, passed in February, places a duty on employers to ensure digital systems do not create health and safety risks, and allows union representatives to inspect them. Whether it applies to a general-purpose assistant like Copilot remains untested.
Nicholas Davis, co-director of the University of Technology Sydneyโs Human Technology Institute, said Boyle reacted less to the software than to the way it arrived.
โThis is not just a tech refusal story. This is a conduct issue,โ he said.
Australians rank among the least trusting of AI in the world, according to research by KPMG and the University of Melbourne. Davis said the distrust is not of whether the systems work, but of how employers are using them.
โYou lose great people,โ he said. โYou donโt want to lose staff because you are not managing the change process well, completely aside from your legal requirements to consult.โ
He was pessimistic about Boyleโs chances of avoiding AI elsewhere.
โSaying I donโt want to work anywhere where thereโs AI is very similar to saying I donโt want to work anywhere where a Google product is used,โ he said. โItโs possible, but it is very, very hard.โ
Boyle is now living in a 1986 Toyota Troop Carrier with her cat, carrying a flip phone and handing cards to strangers on their screens that read: โIโm open to talk, want to have a conversation?โ
โWhat we do on an individual level matters,โ Boyle said. โOur input adds to their data. Our time adds to their power. Thatโs why Iโm no longer online and refuse AI wherever I can. Itโs my personal way of protesting against a future I donโt want.โ
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.