Waleed Aly has warned free-to-air television is ‘staring into the abyss’ after The Project, which he co-hosted for 14 of its 16 years, was suddenly axed.

In a column for The Age newspaper – that Aly insisted he never really wanted to write – the public intellectual and TV personality warned the Network Ten show’s demise was a consequence of the growing power of the tech giants.

‘As a general rule, I don’t commentate on my own work. My editors urged me to reconsider, then left me to it,’ he wrote.

‘Improbably, then, here we are. But only because there are bigger things at stake than the fate of this or that television show.’

Aly noted that free-to-air TV was losing audience to streaming services but highlighted a bigger threat: that tech giants, such as Meta and Google, were collecting ‘frankly unconscionable amounts of their users’ personal data’.

Therefore, they could target audiences with better tailored ads than TV ever could.

The Project co-host Waleed Aly penned a warning about the way AI and the tech giants could impact our lives

‘That will remain so for as long as television doesn’t turn the camera on you and monitor your every move,’ Aly wrote.

‘What has inevitably followed is a flight, not so much of audiences, but of advertisers to these tech giants.

‘This, I think, is a major problem. Not because free-to-air television is uniquely precious, but because that amount of data collection in the hands of a select few tech moguls simply shouldn’t be allowed to exist.’

The Project co-host said the tech giants have been allowed to grow ‘with no serious regulation’ and governments were doing nothing to stop them.

He then took aim at artificial intelligence and how it could follow the same path as the likes of Facebook and Google – with users’ intimate data used to create an ‘advertising product’.

Aly noted that ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI was considering incorporating advertising into its services.

Tech companies like Meta have been hoovering up huge amounts of personal data

Aly ended his piece warning of the ’empires’ that were being built in television’s place ‘and precisely what will have been plundered to erect them’.

Network Ten has announced it will be replacing the Project with a news program, known as 10 News+, from 6pm.

The news program will be hosted by Denham Hitchcock and Amelia Brace – both formerly of the Seven Network – and is being helmed by executive producer Daniel Sutton, a veteran Ten reporter.

In an interview with Mediaweek, Mr Sutton said the new show would go deeper than the typical 6pm news fare of ‘car crashes, house fires and state politics.’

‘We’ll go in depth on issues that affect Aussies, and get into the “why”, not just the who, what and when.

‘And when we break a big story, we’ll have the time to explain it and dig into the detail.’

10 News+ will start Monday, June 30, on 10 and 10 Play.