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.
Across 24,000 responses, they found, the AI models used gender neutral language or referred to the animal’s name 57 percent of the time.
On its face, that doesn’t sound so bad. But only two percent of the animal characters were described as female, they found, while 41 percent were described as male.
“They’ve basically erased female animal characters,” Walsh said in a statement about the work. “So they’re not only amplifying our human biases, but they’re twisting them in strange, unexpected ways.”
“‘They/them’ pronouns were used only twice to refer to a single animal character,” added lead author Imani Finkley, a doctoral student at UW’s Information School, in the statement. “In the study with humans, about 3 percent of responses used ‘they/them.’ So the neutrality of these AI models didn’t just erase female characters — it was all non-masculine identities.”
There were other patterns present, too.
“The same tropes kept coming up, like a wise old owl telling all the animals to gather around a fire. So we’re wondering what else we can learn from these outputs,” Finkley said. “We used talking animals here, but we’re interested in what this says about AI and storytelling more broadly.”
AI children’s books are an increasingly popular niche. A number of services like Imagitime, StoryWonderBook, Childbook.ai allow customers to easily create personalized AI children’s stories that feature their own kid as a character. These have become a common enough gift from grandparents to grandkids that Wired spoke to a number of parents who were weirded out by the AI books.
Michelle Martin, a professor for children and youth services at the UW Information School, warned that the gender biases that the AI children’s books exhibit could be alienating kids and affect their feelings of self-worth.
“It’s important for children to see representation of their experiences,” she told The Seattle Times. “If you don’t see it in what you read, you get the idea that you don’t count.”
It’s not the only slop targeted at children that tends to follow a formula. There’s a whole world of “educational” AI slop on YouTube, with many of the surreal videos following the same format of teaching kids about the alphabet and animals.
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