The Persistence of Cultural Memory: Investigating Multimodal Iconicity in Diffusion Models

Our work addresses the ambiguity between generalization and memorization in text-to-image diffusion models, focusing on a specific case we term multimodal iconicity. This refers to instances where images and texts evoke culturally shared associations, such as when a title recalls a familiar artwork or film scene. While prior research on memorization and unlearning emphasizes forgetting, we examine what is remembered and how, focusing on the balance between recognizing cultural references and reproducing them. We introduce an evaluation framework that separates recognition, whether a model identifies a reference, from realization, how it depicts it through replication or reinterpretation, quantified through measures capturing both dimensions. By evaluating five diffusion models across 767 Wikidata-derived cultural references spanning static and dynamic imagery, we show that our framework distinguishes replication from transformation more effectively than existing similarity-based methods. To assess linguistic sensitivity, we conduct prompt perturbation experiments using synonym substitutions and literal image descriptions, finding that models often reproduce iconic visual structures even when textual cues are altered. Finally, our analysis shows that cultural alignment correlates not only with training data frequency, but also textual uniqueness, reference popularity, and creation date. Our work reveals that the value of diffusion models lies not only in what they reproduce but in how they transform and recontextualize cultural knowledge, advancing evaluation beyond simple text-image matching toward richer contextual understanding.

Exploring Language Patterns of Prompts in Text-to-Image Generation and Their Impact on Visual Diversity

Following the initial excitement, Text-to-Image (TTI) models are now being examined more critically. While much of the discourse has focused on biases and stereotypes embedded in large-scale training datasets, the sociotechnical dynamics of user interactions with these models remain underexplored. This study examines the linguistic and semantic choices users make when crafting prompts and how these choices influence the diversity of generated outputs. Analyzing over six million prompts from the Civiverse dataset on the CivitAI platform across seven months, we categorize users into three groups based on their levels of linguistic experimentation: consistent repeaters, occasional repeaters, and non-repeaters. Our findings reveal that as user participation grows over time, prompt language becomes increasingly homogenized through the adoption of popular community tags and descriptors, with repeated prompts comprising 40-50% of submissions. At the same time, semantic similarity and topic preferences remain relatively stable, emphasizing common subjects and surface aesthetics. Using Vendi scores to quantify visual diversity, we demonstrate a clear correlation between lexical similarity in prompts and the visual similarity of generated images, showing that linguistic repetition reinforces less diverse representations. These findings highlight the significant role of user-driven factors in shaping AI-generated imagery, beyond inherent model biases, and underscore the need for tools and practices that encourage greater linguistic and thematic experimentation within TTI systems to foster more inclusive and diverse AI-generated content.