# Text-to-Image Models and Their Representation of People from Different Nationalities Engaging in Activities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06313 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06313/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
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- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01291/) (2024)
- [Easily Accessible Text-to-Image Generation Amplifies Demographic Stereotypes at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03759/) (2022)
- [DALL-Eval: Probing the Reasoning Skills and Social Biases of Text-to-Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04053/) (2022)
- [Stable Bias: Analyzing Societal Representations in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11408/) (2023)
- [A Framework for Understanding Sources of Harm throughout the Machine Learning Life Cycle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10002/) (2019)
- [Alpha-CLIP: A CLIP Model Focusing on Wherever You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03818/) (2023)
- [REVISE: A Tool for Measuring and Mitigating Bias in Visual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07999/) (2020)
- [Holistic Analysis of Hallucination in GPT-4V(ision): Bias and Interference Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03287/) (2023)
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- [Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04068/) (2020)
- [Survey of Bias In Text-to-Image Generation: Definition, Evaluation, and Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01030/) (2024)
- [ITI-GEN: Inclusive Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05569/) (2023)
- [OpenBias: Open-set Bias Detection in Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07990/) (2024)
- [AI's Regimes of Representation: A Community-centered Study of Text-to-Image Models in South Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11844/) (2023)
- [VHELM: A Holistic Evaluation of Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07112/) (2024)
- [Inspecting the Geographical Representativeness of Images from Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11080/) (2023)
- [An image speaks a thousand words, but can everyone listen? On image transcreation for cultural relevance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01247/) (2024)
- [Divide, Evaluate, and Refine: Evaluating and Improving Text-to-Image Alignment with Iterative VQA Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04749/) (2023)
- [Beyond Aesthetics: Cultural Competence in Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06863/) (2024)
- [AI for social science and social science of AI: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11839/) (2024)
- [ViSAGe: A Global-Scale Analysis of Visual Stereotypes in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06310/) (2024)
- [Culturally Aware and Adapted NLP: A Taxonomy and a Survey of the State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03930/) (2024)
- [Do Generative AI Models Output Harm while Representing Non-Western Cultures: Evidence from A Community-Centered Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14779/) (2024)
- [SeeGULL Multilingual: a Dataset of Geo-Culturally Situated Stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05696/) (2024)
- [Improving Geo-diversity of Generated Images with Contextualized Vendi Score Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04551/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper investigates how popular text-to-image (T2I) models, DALL-E 3 and Gemini 3 Pro Preview, depict people from 206 nationalities when prompted to generate images of individuals engaging in common everyday activities. Five scenarios were developed, and 2,060 images were generated using input prompts that specified nationalities across five activities. When aggregating across activities and models, results showed that 28.4% of the images depicted individuals wearing traditional attire, including attire that is impractical for the specified activities in several cases. This pattern was statistically significantly associated with regions, with the Middle East & North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa disproportionately affected, and was also associated with World Bank income groups. Similar region- and income-linked patterns were observed for images labeled as depicting impractical attire in two athletics-related activities. To assess image-text alignment, CLIP, ALIGN, and GPT-4.1 mini were used to score 9,270 image-prompt pairs. Images labeled as featuring traditional attire received statistically significantly higher alignment scores when prompts included country names, and this pattern weakened or reversed when country names were removed. Revised prompt analysis showed that one model frequently inserted the word "traditional" (50.3% for traditional-labeled images vs. 16.6% otherwise). These results indicate that these representational patterns can be shaped by several components of the pipeline, including image generator, evaluation models, and prompt revision.