He, it, but rarely she: When AI models write kids’ stories about animals, female characters vanish

He, it, but rarely she: When AI models write kids’ stories about animals, female characters vanishPrompted by GeekWire to create three separate children’s stories about animals — a bear, a bird and a cat — Google Gemini Storybook rendered three male characters. A new UW study dives much deeper into AI models’ gendering of animal characters. When artificial intelligence writes children’s stories about animals, female characters almost entirely vanish. Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 generated the highest proportion of female characters, though that figure still maxed out at just 4%. “The neutrality of these AI models didn’t just erase female characters,” Finkley said.