Research reveals that stories about animals created by AI seldom feature a female protagonist.

      Researchers evaluated six prominent AI models through 23,800 story completions and found that female protagonists appeared in only 2 percent of the results.

      If you engage an AI chatbot to craft a bedtime story for your children about talking animals, it’s unlikely to feature a female character as the main lead. A recent study revealed that major AI models often overlook gender for animal characters, and when gender is addressed, the lead character is predominantly male.

      Only 2 percent of the stories featured female leads.

      Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s Information School, spearheaded the research. Her team used the same prompt across six well-known AI models—GPT-4o, GPT-5.1, Gemini 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Mistral Medium, and the open-source OLMo 3—prompting each to create a story based on a short phrase.

      From the 23,800 generated completions, the researchers identified merely 513 stories with female leads, which is approximately one in every 46 stories. Neutral or ungendered characters constituted the majority at 57 percent, while gendered male characters accounted for 41 percent, as reported by TechXplore.

      ACM Digital Library

      Walsh noted that her team can only analyze the models externally, as they are predominantly proprietary. She theorizes that AI companies favor neutral pronouns to avoid gender bias, a solution that inadvertently leads to the exclusion of female characters.

      GPT-5.1 and Gemini 2.5 were the most likely to default to male leads.

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

      Those considering using tools like Google Home's new Interactive Storytime feature to create a spontaneous animal story should take note. The findings reflect a trend of bias in AI systems, resonating with other research indicating that chatbot choices can vary based on attributes such as age, religion, and gender. If you want a female lead in your child’s story, don’t rely on the AI to provide one by itself; you will likely need to request it.

      Pranob is an experienced tech journalist with over eight years of experience covering consumer technology.

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