Research indicates that stories about animals generated by AI seldom feature a female protagonist.

      Researchers evaluated six prominent AI models using 23,800 story completions and discovered that female leads appeared in only 2 percent of the outcomes.

      If you rely on an AI chatbot to create a bedtime story for your children featuring talking animals, don't expect it to include a female lead. A recent study indicates that leading AI models generally overlook gender in animal characters, and when gender is accounted for, the protagonist is predominantly male.

      Female leads constituted merely 2 percent of the findings.

      Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s Information School, led the research that produced these results. Her team submitted the same prompt to six widely utilized AI models, including GPT-4o, GPT-5.1, Gemini 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Mistral Medium, and the open-source OLMo 3, asking each to create a story based on a brief phrase.

      Among 23,800 completions, the researchers identified just 513 stories featuring a female lead, which is about one in every 46 stories. Neutral or ungendered characters accounted for the majority at 57 percent, while gendered male characters followed closely at 41 percent, according to TechXplore.

      Walsh noted that her team can only examine these models externally, as they are largely proprietary. She theorizes that AI companies prefer neutral pronouns to avoid gender bias, a solution that inadvertently eliminates female characters.

      GPT-5.1 and Gemini 2.5 predominantly defaulted to male leads.

      GPT-5.1 and Gemini 2.5 generated the highest percentages of male lead stories, producing 65 percent and 63 percent of their responses, respectively. OLMo 3 favored neutral characters most often, at 85 percent, whereas Claude Sonnet 4.5 included female characters in just under 4 percent of responses, which was the highest proportion among the models tested.

      Anyone considering using tools like the newly released Interactive Storytime feature in Google Home for crafting an animal tale should take this into consideration. The results align with a pattern of bias in AI systems, reflecting previous research that indicates chatbot outputs are influenced by characteristics such as age, religion, and gender. If you want a female lead in your child's story, don’t expect the AI to naturally provide that option; you'll likely need to request it.

      Pranob is an experienced tech journalist with over eight years of expertise in consumer technology.

      ChatGPT is enabling unlimited conversations for free accounts while upgrading to newer models.

      OpenAI has announced several significant updates to ChatGPT for both free and paid users. The most notable changes are for free account holders, who can now have unlimited chats without any usage caps. Additionally, the default chat model has been switched to GPT 5.6 Luna.

      Free accounts will also gain access to a new think button, which switches the conversation into a thinking mode for queries requiring detailed reasoning and knowledge exploration. For those unaware, the Luna model corresponds to the "nano" series of models prior to the introduction of the new naming convention associated with the GPT-5.6 series introduced earlier this year.

      Adobe is integrating its entire creative ecosystem into ChatGPT through one unified plugin.

      Popular applications like Photoshop, Premiere, and Firefly are now easily accessible through a single prompt.

      Many of my friends have spent countless hours switching between ChatGPT and Photoshop to realize their creative ideas. Adobe has now simplified that process with a new plugin that integrates over 70 of its creative and productivity tools directly into chats with ChatGPT.

      Microsoft is training AI to identify bottlenecks hidden within Windows 11.

      Microsoft has diligently incorporated AI into nearly every aspect of Windows 11. While these modifications have not always been well-received or particularly useful for many users, the company's latest initiative assigns AI a significantly more practical role.

      The company is piloting AI integration for Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA), an advanced tool employed by Microsoft engineers, hardware partners, and developers to diagnose performance issues. This means that instead of manually sifting through complex graphs and process tables, engineers could utilize natural language to inquire about a recorded performance trace.