Biased Tales: Cultural and Topic Bias in Generating Children's Stories

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rooein, Donya, Zouhar, Vilém, Nozza, Debora, Hovy, Dirk
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915487054561280
author Rooein, Donya
Zouhar, Vilém
Nozza, Debora
Hovy, Dirk
author_facet Rooein, Donya
Zouhar, Vilém
Nozza, Debora
Hovy, Dirk
contents Stories play a pivotal role in human communication, shaping beliefs and morals, particularly in children. As parents increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) to craft bedtime stories, the presence of cultural and gender stereotypes in these narratives raises significant concerns. To address this issue, we present Biased Tales, a comprehensive dataset designed to analyze how biases influence protagonists' attributes and story elements in LLM-generated stories. Our analysis uncovers striking disparities. When the protagonist is described as a girl (as compared to a boy), appearance-related attributes increase by 55.26%. Stories featuring non-Western children disproportionately emphasize cultural heritage, tradition, and family themes far more than those for Western children. Our findings highlight the role of sociocultural bias in making creative AI use more equitable and diverse.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_07908
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Biased Tales: Cultural and Topic Bias in Generating Children's Stories
Rooein, Donya
Zouhar, Vilém
Nozza, Debora
Hovy, Dirk
Computation and Language
Stories play a pivotal role in human communication, shaping beliefs and morals, particularly in children. As parents increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) to craft bedtime stories, the presence of cultural and gender stereotypes in these narratives raises significant concerns. To address this issue, we present Biased Tales, a comprehensive dataset designed to analyze how biases influence protagonists' attributes and story elements in LLM-generated stories. Our analysis uncovers striking disparities. When the protagonist is described as a girl (as compared to a boy), appearance-related attributes increase by 55.26%. Stories featuring non-Western children disproportionately emphasize cultural heritage, tradition, and family themes far more than those for Western children. Our findings highlight the role of sociocultural bias in making creative AI use more equitable and diverse.
title Biased Tales: Cultural and Topic Bias in Generating Children's Stories
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07908