Evaluating AI-Generated Images of Cultural Artifacts with Community-Informed Rubrics

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes community involvement in defining culturally appropriate AI-generated images, proposing a framework for systematic measurement that incorporates community perspectives to improve AI fairness and representation.

Contribution

It introduces a community-informed approach to systematize 'cultural appropriateness' in AI image generation, with case studies involving diverse communities.

Findings

Community involvement leads to more valid measures of cultural appropriateness.

Systematized concepts reflect community members' lived experiences.

Automated measurement instruments can be operationalized from community-defined concepts.

Abstract

Measurement is essential to improving AI performance and mitigating harms for marginalized groups. As generative AI systems are rapidly deployed across geographies and contexts, AI measurement practices must be designed to support repeatable, automatable application across different models, datasets, and evaluation settings. But the drive to automate measurement can be in tension with the ability for measurement instruments to capture the expertise and perspectives of communities impacted by AI. Recent work advocates for breaking measurement into several key stages: first moving from an abstract concept to be measured into a precise, "systematized" concept; next operationalizing the systematized concept into a concrete measurement instrument; and finally applying the measurement instrument on data to produce measurements. This opens up an opportunity to concentrate community engagement in the systematization phase before operationalizing and applying measurement instruments. In this paper, we explore how to involve communities in systematizing the concept of "cultural appropriateness" in text-to-image models' representation of culturally significant artifacts through case studies with three communities: blind and low vision individuals residing in the UK, residents of Kerala, and residents of Tamil Nadu. Our systematized concepts reflect community members' lived experiences interacting with each artifact and how they want their material culture to be depicted, demonstrating the value of community involvement in defining valid measures. We explore how these systematized concepts can be operationalized into automated measurement instruments that could be applied using a multimodal LLM-as-a-judge approach and challenges that remain. We reflect on the benefits and limitations of such approaches.