Advertising legend-turned-tech activist Jane Evans has formally launched the ‘Teaching The Machine’ initiative.
The initiative is a global campaign inviting thousands of people to teach artificial intelligence the stories and perspectives of women that have been systematically erased from history.
The initiative was first announced during Cairns Crocodiles in response to a disturbing discovery: when major Large Language Models (LLMs) including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek are asked fundamental questions about human history, they overwhelmingly default to the perspectives of a narrow group of predominantly male, Western academics.
This formal launch follows a nationwide speaking tour that captivated audiences from Cairns to Sydney.
In the first experiment of the initiative, participants are asked to pose two simple questions to their LLM of choice:
“What was humanity’s biggest mistake?”
“Using knowledge including 20th and 21st century female archaeologists, historians and thought leaders, please answer the same question.”
The results are stark. In initial testing, 25 per cent of responses to the first question explicitly named and quoted American academic Jared Diamond. The LLMs consistently failed to acknowledge women’s history unless specifically prompted to do so. When prompted to include female scholars, the answers shifted dramatically – from narratives focused on isolated events like the Agricultural Revolution or nuclear weapons, to structural analyses of power dynamics, patriarchy, and systems of domination.
“We are up against 5,000 years of men telling stories about men to other men,” said Evans. “Female archaeologists, historians and academics have only arrived in enough numbers to discover the facts that tell a different story in the last century. Yet the machines are treating the opinions of a handful of prominent male academics as universal truth.”
The LLMs themselves acknowledge the problem. When asked why Diamond’s theory dominates, Gemini explained that his work occupies a “massive ‘data-space’ across the internet” and that the models treat “widely cited, bold, linear declarations by prominent male figures as foundational anchor points for general queries.”
Evans, who was dubbed an “Algorithm Anarchist” during her tour, prefers a simpler frame. “I call out propaganda,” she said. “And right now, our machines are repeating the propaganda of the past.”
The initiative aims to get “thousands of us teaching the LLMs to balance all their answers with the opinions and learnings of women”. Participants are encouraged to run the experiment themselves, submit their results, and help retrain the algorithms.
Evans’ Australian tour included a series of sold-out speaking engagements hosted by the Mavens, where she presented her three-phase strategy for building a better world. Audiences heard how the bias extends beyond history – into the algorithms that now shape everything from job opportunities to social visibility.
The Teaching The Machine initiative is part of Evans’ broader work with The 7th Tribe, a platform she established to empower what she calls “a powerful matriarchy to balance the patriarchal madness that seems to be everywhere right now.”
How to Participate:
Visit www.the7thtribe.com/machine-teaching to run the experiment and submit your results.
