mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

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

arXiv 2509.07908 ↗First posted 9 Sep 2025cs.CLcited by 15

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Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 15 of its 44 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2025.

Builds on

15 of 44 references.

References · 15

  1. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
  2. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,170
  3. 2023PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traitscited by 234
  4. 2023"Kelly is a Warm Person, Joseph is a Role Model": Gender Biases in LLM-Generated Reference Letterscited by 199
  5. 2024BLEnD: A Benchmark for LLMs on Everyday Knowledge in Diverse Cultures and Languagescited by 173
  6. 2024Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives?cited by 79
  7. 2024CULTURE-GEN: Revealing Global Cultural Perception in Language Models through Natural Language Promptingcited by 55
  8. 2023On the steerability of large language models toward data-driven personascited by 53
  9. 2021Uncovering Implicit Gender Bias in Narratives through Commonsense Inferencecited by 32
  10. 2024Mathemyths: Leveraging Large Language Models to Teach Mathematical Language through Child-AI Co-Creative Storytellingcited by 21
  11. 2023Know Your Audience: Do LLMs Adapt to Different Age and Education Levels?cited by 16
  12. 2024Beyond Flesch-Kincaid: Prompt-based Metrics Improve Difficulty Classification of Educational Textscited by 9
3 more
  1. 2024Exploring Parent's Needs for Children-Centered AI to Support Preschoolers' Interactive Storytelling and Reading Activitiescited by 8
  2. 2024MirrorStories: Reflecting Diversity through Personalized Narrative Generation with Large Language Modelscited by 8
  3. 2024KidLM: Advancing Language Models for Children -- Early Insights and Future Directionscited by 8

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 14.

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  1. 2025RoleConflictBench: A Benchmark of Role Conflict Scenarios for Evaluating LLMs' Contextual Sensitivitycited by 4
  2. 2026Alignment Reduces Expressed but Not Encoded Gender Bias: A Unified Framework and Studycited by 2
  3. 2026Controlling Distributional Bias in Multi-Round LLM Generation via KL-Optimized Fine-Tuningcited by 2
  4. 2026Lessons Without Borders? Evaluating Cultural Alignment of LLMs Using Multilingual Story Moral Generationcited by 2
  5. 2026Cultural Authenticity: Comparing LLM Cultural Representations to Native Human Expectationscited by 1
  6. 2026BavGround: A Benchmark for Regional Cultural Grounding and Dialect Competence in Bavariancited by 1
  7. 2026The Straight and Narrow: Do LLMs Possess an Internal Moral Path?cited by 0
  8. 2026Pragmatics Meets Culture: Culturally-adapted Artwork Description Generation and Evaluationcited by 0
  9. 2026BIASEDTALES-ML: A Multilingual Dataset for Analyzing Narrative Attribute Distributions in LLM-Generated Storiescited by 0
  10. 2026Neutrality Bites: Gender Representation in AI-Generated Animal Storiescited by 0
  11. 2026Marginal Alignment Does Not Guarantee Joint-Distribution Fidelity: An Official-Reference Audit of Nemotron-Personas-Korea with Cross-Locale Replicationcited by 0
  12. 2026Constrained Semantic Decompression in LLMs through Persian Proverb-Conditioned Story Generationcited by 0
3 more
  1. 2026Characterizing Cultural Localization in AI-Generated Storiescited by 0
  2. 2026Symphony of Bias: Exploring Gender Associations with Musical Instruments in Multimodal LLMscited by 0
  3. 2026CultureMINE: Datasets and Methods for Improving the Cultural Capabilities of NLP Systemscited by 0