"Yet, counterintuitively, research shows that gender bias is actually morepronounced in stories about animal characters than in stories about human characters. A recent analysis of 300 popular children's books found that male animal characters appeared twice as often as female characters. But in this new study, female animal characters featured in just 513 AI-generated stories, compared to 9,673 stories with male characters (a nearly 19-fold difference). "The neutrality of these AI models didn't just erase female characters – it was all non-masculine identities," says Finkley. Generative AI models 'wrote' fewer stories with female animal characters than humans given the same prompt.