When Cars Have Stereotypes: Auditing Demographic Bias in Objects from Text-to-Image Models
While prior research on text-to-image generation has predominantly focused on biases in human depictions, demographic bias in generated objects remains relatively underexplored. We introduce SODA (Stereotyped Object Diagnostic Audit), a novel framework for systematically measuring these biases through automated attribute discovery and three standardized metrics: Base vs. Demographic Divergence (BDS), Cross-Demographic Disparity (CDS), and Visual Attribute Concentration (VAC). Applying SODA to 8,000 images across five state-of-the-art models and eight object categories (e.g., cars), we find that "neutral" prompts produce outputs most visually similar to middle-aged and White people, suggesting these groups are implicitly over-represented in model defaults. Furthermore, demographic cues trigger highly skewed stereotypical outputs: 26.6% of object-model-demographic combinations produce results where all 20 generated images share the exact same attribute value (e.g., rose gold laptops for women). Finally, prompt-level debiasing reduces inter-group disparity but paradoxically collapses within-group diversity, replacing one stereotype with another. SODA offers a practical pipeline for making these implicit associations measurable, serving as a step toward more responsible AI development.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Text-to-Image GenerationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Who Gets Which Message? Auditing Demographic Bias in LLM-Generated Targeted Text
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of generating personalized, persuasive text at scale, raising new questions about bias and fairness in automated communication. This paper presents the first systemat…
Who is better at math, Jenny or Jingzhen? Uncovering Stereotypes in Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to propagate and amplify harmful stereotypes, particularly those that disproportionately affect marginalised communities. To understand the effect of these stereotypes more co…
MathWho Defines Fairness? Target-Based Prompting for Demographic Representation in Generative Models
Text-to-image(T2I) models like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E have made generative AI widely accessible, yet recent studies reveal that these systems often replicate societal biases, particularly in how they depict demograp…
Easily Accessible Text-to-Image Generation Amplifies Demographic Stereotypes at Large Scale
Machine learning models that convert user-written text descriptions into images are now widely available online and used by millions of users to generate millions of images a day. We investigate the potential for these m…
Image GenerationText to Image GenerationText-to-Image GenerationMarked Personas: Using Natural Language Prompts to Measure Stereotypes in Language Models
To recognize and mitigate harms from large language models (LLMs), we need to understand the prevalence and nuances of stereotypes in LLM outputs. Toward this end, we present Marked Personas, a prompt-based method to mea…
Story Generation