At some point in the past, I noticed that I had a strong tendency to make NPCs male, even though there wasn’t any good story or setting-specific reason to do so. From gods to villains to random shopkeepers - most of these were assigned male without me even realizing that I have been doing it.
Thus, I started to assign genders by the roll of a dice - and I am fairly pleased with the results as this made the world significantly more diverse.
How about you? Have you noticed any similar biases in your own NPCs - and if so, what did you do about this?
Yes. I use chat AI for this kind of thing, you can ask it to generate a table and then roll on the table, or just generate a list of NPCs and ask for a % representation of people.
How well does chat AI do when it comes to representation?
One huge flaw of AI-based systems I keep on hearing about is that they tend to repeat the biases of their training data.