According to literature scholars and AI, classic fairy tale figures Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty have more in common than their origins as part of Disney’s famous roster of characters. Their fairy tales are also full of gender bias and stereotypes.
A team of researchers from Northeastern University, University of California Los Angeles, and IBM Research have created an artificial intelligence framework that can analyze children’s storybooks and detect cases of gender bias. Their research has been published on the arXiv preprint server.
The way fairy tales depict and teach lessons, morals, and sociocultural roles to children, particularly young girls, has been discussed in academia and beyond for decades. These stories are full of princesses who need saving and handsome princes who are there to save them.
The hope is that the AI-driven, spellcheck-like tool his team has created will be used by writers and publishers, as well as researchers, to create more inclusive stories for children, says Dakuo Wang, an associate professor at Northeastern and one of the researchers on the project.
“If in the future I have a baby girl, I don’t want her to feel discouraged to take on those tasks or conquer those challenges [or] say, someone will come save me or it’s not supposed to be something I would do as a girl,” Wang says. “If we can develop a technology to automatically detect or flag those kinds of gender biases and stereotypes, then it can at least serve as a guardrail or safety net not just for ancient fairy tales but the new stories being written and created every day today.”
2023-06-03 14:30:03
Post from phys.org rnrn