Going PLACES: Participatory Localized Red Teaming forText-to-Image Safety in the Global South

Abstract

Despite the global deployment of text-to-image (T2I) models, their safety frameworks are largely calibrated to a Western-centric default, creating significant vulnerabilities for the rest of the world. To embrace cultural pluralism and bring historicallyunder-represented perspectives in T2I safety, we conduct localised community-centered red teaming studies in the GlobalSouth. Our two-fold approach prioritizes localization and participation, by focusing on secondary urban centers in theseregions, and conducting community engagement and training workshops to contextualize local norms. As a result, we presentPLACES, a dataset comprising over 26,000 examples of T2I model failures collected in partnership with universities in Ghana,Nigeria, and two regions of India (Karnataka and Punjab). Analysis of prompts collected reveals a wide-ranging diversity insocio-cultural and linguistic attributes, when compared to existing geography-agnostic crowdsourced red-teaming data. Weobserve unique adversarial patterns enabled by local cultural and linguistic nuances, and distinct clusters within region aroundspecific themes, such as religion in India. Moreover, we uncover structural contextual gaps in existing safety frameworks byidentifying novel harms showing normative dissonance (e.g., violating religious norms, ignoring local customs, and ominoussymbolism). This work argues that expanding T2I safety requires moving beyond mere scale to incorporate deeply localized,participatory methodologies for data collection and contextualization.