Unexpected Gender Stereotypes in AI-generated Stories: Hairdressers Are Female, but so Are Doctors

We investigated gender bias in short stories generated by ChatGPT by generating stories about characters with specifed occupations and analyzing the gender assigned to these characters. On the one hand, stereotypes about professions typically associated with women are strongly reinforced, with almost all of the characters in these stories being female, well beyond what would be expected based on human biases. On the other hand, among occupations that humans typically associate with men, the generated stories reinforce these stereotypes in some cases (particularly blue-collar occupations), while reversing them to be strongly stereotypically female in other cases (notably highly regarded professions such as doctors, scientists, attorneys, or astronauts).