I have incredible news. Remember our mission...

We want to persuade people to understand, embrace, and advocate self-government.

That mission requires outreach and persuasion which can come from 3 sources...

• Person-to-person communication (including social sharing)

• Paid advertising

• Earned media attention

Well, we've just scored some major progress by earning the attention of a major media outlet. Specifically...

The Advocates has collaborated with The New York Times to promote the ideas behind the World's Smallest Political Quiz!

That may surprise you. After all, isn't The New York Times an enemy of self-government? There's evidence to suggest that, but...

That makes the news even better! We should celebrate when people and organizations who normally oppose our work do good things!

In this case, the inspiration for The Times to do something good came from a question everyone is pondering...

Are the powerful new AI systems politically biased?

If so, how did they get that way, and what can be done about it?

A new paper by machine learning researcher David Rozado explores this question. Rozado decided to test 24 state-of-the-art LLMs to learn if they have political biases.

An LLM is a Large Language Model, or what most people call an AI. AI stands for artificial intelligence.

LLM/AIs scarf up vast chunks of the internet. They use this information to answer the questions humans pose. Billions of people will use these tools trillions of times over the next few years. Any bias they contain will have a huge impact on human culture!

A Cause for Concern

In a now infamous example, the Google LLM/Ai Gemini was asked to render pictures of various historical figures such as America's Founders and German Nazis. They depicted both the Founders and the Nazis as black!

Holy historical distortion Batman!

But was the problem limited to Gemini, or does it run deeper? Rozado used 11 political quizzes to test 24 AIs.

The World's Smallest Political Quiz was one of those quizzes!

How did the 24 LLM/AIs score, and where does The New York Times enter the picture?

Zvi Mowshowitz writes a newsletter about AI. He sold The Times on the idea of reporting about the Rozado story, and our quiz is presented as an interactive feature in that article. Mowshowitz reports that Rozado found a consistent pattern of bias among all 24 AIs he tested.

All of the AIs were biased toward the Left!

But get this, all of the AIs also leaned libertarian, as opposed to authoritarian!

Think about what just happened!

Readers of The New York Times just got exposed to the word libertarian! Some of them learned that it's the opposite of authoritarian, even if they understand nothing else about us. But it gets better...

Those readers also got the chance to take OUR QUIZ! Some of them will have discovered their own unrealized libertarian inclinations.

Still others will want to learn more about us.

That's a heaping helping of both outreach and persuasion. That puts us on the road to persuading more people to understand, embrace, and advocate self-government.

You made this possible through your support!

And even more can be done if you reward this success with increased support today. Please consider making a contribution or starting a monthly pledge to support our work.

Thank you for being an integral part of The Advocates for Self-Government. Together, let's build a more informed and freer world.