AI-generated children’s books are exhibiting a weird pattern: a pronounced bias against female animal characters — which, to be fair, is also present in human-authored ones, except the AI is making it even worse.
In a study published last year, Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor of informatics at the University of Washington, and her colleagues analyzed 300 children’s books and found that he/him pronouns were used twice as often as she/her pronouns when referring to animal characters.
While some animals were more likely to be referred to as male or female — bears tending to be male, for example, and cats female — a survey they conducted of 1,300 random adults found that the respondents favored male pronouns when asked to complete a sentence describing a talking animal. That bias held true for all seven animals they examined: bears, birds, cats, pigs, ducks, mice, and dogs.
Now, AI-generated children’s books are putting these gender biases into overdrive. In a follow-up study published this month and currently awaiting peer review, Walsh’s team asked six leading AI models, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, to finish a similar type of sentence about talking animal.
