Can AI See the Unseen? Measuring the Perception Gap for Tibetan Cultural Symbols in AI-Generated Art

Bias and hallucinations in low-resource cultural artefacts significantly impede text-to-image generation models from understanding and disseminating. Focusing on Tibetan as a Chinese minority culture, we produced a children’s picture book through two methods: AI generation and human illustrator. Eye-tracking experiments were employed to investigate participants’ implicit attitudes, aesthetic biases, and cultural perceptions towards these two sources. The results revealed that (1) the hand-drawn group demonstrated higher fidelity to Tibetan culture, exhibiting a positive aesthetic calibration effect in terms of cultural adaptability owing to viewers’ attention duration to the cultural symbols details. (2) The AI-generated group elicited greater viewer interest and emotional engagement through its asymmetric color palettes, especially in color richness and stylistic rendering, and achieved professional-level compositional maturity in multi-character scene generation. This study provides empirical evidence to inform the division of labor between humans and AI in children’s book illustration and explores potential models for future human-AI collaboration.