Whose Values Are Generated? Measuring Visual Value Leakage in Multilingual Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) systems serve users across languages and cultural contexts. However, evaluations of cultural representation focus mainly on recognizable elements such as landmarks, clothing, and activities, while overlooking the cultural values conveyed by generated images. We introduce **VisionValueBench**, a multilingual benchmark that operationalizes six cultural value dimensions from Hofstede’s framework, such as individualism versus collectivism, to investigate how T2I systems frame neutral social situations in a particular cultural orientation. We find that value-neutral prompts allowing diverse cultural interpretations nevertheless produce images that favor particular value orientations, a phenomenon we call *visual value leakage*. Across 960 social scenarios and six T2I configurations, we evaluate prompts varying in language and geographic cues. Generated images consistently favor low power distance, individualism, care and quality of life, long-term orientation, high uncertainty avoidance and indulgence. Prompt language has limited influence on value orientations, whereas geographic cues shift some dimensions toward associated cultural values while still preserving the prevailing orientations. These findings reveal substantial homogeneity in the cultural values conveyed by T2I systems worldwide.