AI's Regimes of Representation: A Community-centered Study of
  Text-to-Image Models in South Asia
Rida Qadri Renee Shelby Cynthia L. Bennett Remi Denton
This paper presents a community-centered study of cultural limitations of
text-to-image (T2I) models in the South Asian context. We theorize these
failures using scholarship on dominant media regimes of representations and
locate them within participants' reporting of their existing social
marginalizations. We thus show how generative AI can reproduce an outsiders
gaze for viewing South Asian cultures, shaped by global and regional power
inequities. By centering communities as experts and soliciting their
perspectives on T2I limitations, our study adds rich nuance into existing
evaluative frameworks and deepens our understanding of the culturally-specific
ways AI technologies can fail in non-Western and Global South settings. We
distill lessons for responsible development of T2I models, recommending
concrete pathways forward that can allow for recognition of structural
inequalities.