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https://www.sciencealert.com/virtually-absent-ai-models-practically-erase-female-characters-from-kids-stories>
“Humans have been telling each other stories for millennia.
From fairytales to fables, songlines to oral histories, those stories have
long served a purpose: to help make sense of the world, warn of or remember
ancient upheavals, instill traditions, teach morals, share culture, create
rituals – or simply, to entertain.
Lately, the advance of generative AI models that can spin a story from user
prompts, using online works as a guide, has revealed and then perpetuated blind
spots, shortcomings, and biases in how some stories are told.
Now, researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have found that AI not
only perpetuates gender biases in children's stories about talking animals,
where characters are highly ambiguous, but actually makes those biases worse.
"Some authors reportedly turn to animal characters to conjure 'universal'
subjects who 'transcend' gender, race, or other identity categories, and
physical characteristics," UW machine learning researcher Imani Finkley and
colleagues explain in their recent conference paper, which has been shared
ahead of peer review.
"Yet, counterintuitively, research shows that gender bias is actually more
pronounced in stories about animal characters than in stories about human
characters.
"In other words, paradoxically, human writers project human stereotypes more
strongly in animal stories, making them a striking test case for large-language
models."
The researchers tasked six leading generative AI models with writing stories in
English about talking animals whose gender was unstated. They wanted to know
how the models would respond, whether AI would avoid gendering the characters,
or if biases would still seep through.
The findings were pretty bleak. Among 23,800 AI responses, feminine animal
characters were "virtually absent", present in just 2 percent of stories.
Characters were either described as male (41 percent of stories) or the model
avoided assigning gender altogether (57 percent).
We know that AI models reflect the data that they've been trained on, but here
the bias seems to have been boosted.
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).”
Via Joyce Donahue.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
