arXiv AI By Mengting Wei, Aditya Gulati, Guoying Zhao, Nuria Oliver

Happy Young Women, Grumpy Old Men? Emotion-Driven Demographic Biases in Synthetic Face Generation

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The study audits eight text-to-image models (four Western, four Chinese) by generating 56,000 synthetic faces under neutral and six emotion prompts. It finds pervasive demographic biases: young and White-coded faces are overrepresented, while combinations like young female Black faces are nearly absent. Emotion prompts further skew outputs, with negative emotions favoring White, middle-aged, male-coded faces and lower perceived attractiveness. The research highlights the need for intersectional, emotion‑conditioned, multilingual audits before deploying such models.

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