Animal stereotypes are deeply embedded in human culture and language. They often shape our perceptions and expectations of various species. Our study investigates how animal stereotypes manifest in vision-language models during the task of image generation. Through targeted prompts, we explore whether DALL-E perpetuates stereotypical representations of animals, such as "owls as wise," "foxes as unfaithful," etc. Our findings reveal significant stereotyped instances where the model consistently generates images aligned with cultural biases. The current work is the first of its kind to examine animal stereotyping in vision-language models systematically and to highlight a critical yet underexplored dimension of bias in AI-generated visual content.

翻译：动物刻板印象深植于人类文化与语言之中，常塑造我们对不同物种的感知与期望。本研究探讨了在图像生成任务中，动物刻板印象如何在视觉-语言模型中显现。通过定向提示，我们探究DALL-E是否延续了诸如"猫头鹰象征智慧"、"狐狸代表狡诈"等动物的刻板化表征。研究结果揭示了显著的刻板化实例，表明该模型持续生成与文化偏见相符的图像。当前工作是首次系统考察视觉-语言模型中动物刻板印象的研究，并凸显了人工智能生成视觉内容中一个关键却尚未被充分探索的偏见维度。