arXiv AI
Sep 12

Prompt Revision as a Source of Cultural Bias in Text-to-Image Systems

The paper "Prompt Revision as a Source of Cultural Bias in Text-to-Image Systems" investigates how commercial text‑to‑image models silently modify user prompts before generating images, a step that is often hidden from users. Using the multilingual benchmark WORLDVIEW, the authors audit the revision layer in DALL‑E‑3, Imagen‑4, and GPT‑Image‑1.5, finding that non‑Western and non‑Anglophone contexts are disproportionately marked, reduced to narrow vocabularies, and stereotyped. The study demonstrates that the revision layer itself is a previously undocumented causal source of cultural stereotyping, underscoring the need to audit deployed systems rather than just the underlying models.

By Aleksandra Urman, Elsa Lichtenegger, Salima Jaoua, Azza Bouleimen, Robin Forsberg, Corinna Hertweck, Stefania Ionescu, Nicol\`o Pagan, Ancsa Hannak, Joachim Baumann
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

CultureVidBench: Benchmarking Cultural Understanding in Text-to-Video Generation

CultureVidBench is a new benchmark that evaluates how well text‑to‑video generation models capture cultural details. It contains 1,000 prompts spanning 12 countries, 6 continents, 8 cultural regions, and 14 cultural aspects, grouped into material culture, social practice & performance, and ritual & ceremony. Human studies and automated assessments show that while current models perform well on semantic adherence and visual quality, they often miss fine‑grained cultural details, especially for underrepresented regions and multimodal cues.

By Xianjing Han, Yuhan Su, Yang Deng, Dong Ma, Wee Peng Tay, Bin Zhu
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 26

Playing Bias: Epistemic Games for Interpreting Text-to-Image Models

The paper "Playing Bias: Epistemic Games for Interpreting Text-to-Image Models" proposes a three-stage, humanities-informed framework—Interpret, Interrogate, and Expose—to make the cultural work of text-to-image (T2I) systems visible and debatable. These epistemic games, tested with undergraduate fine‑arts students, shift discussions from impressionistic reactions to concise, evidence‑based hypotheses, using lightweight classroom tools for reproducibility and structured collaboration. The authors argue that such game‑based approaches foster critical literacy, enabling learners to recognize, discuss, and contest how T2I models encode bias.

By Amalia Foka