Synthetic History: Evaluating Visual Representations of the Past in Diffusion Models

Abstract: As Text-to-Image (TTI) diffusion models become increasingly influential in content creation, growing attention is being directed toward their societal and cultural implications. While prior research has primarily examined demographic and cultural biases, the ability of these models to accurately represent historical contexts remains largely underexplored. In this work, we present a systematic and reproducible methodology for evaluating how TTI systems depict different historical periods. For this purpose, we introduce the HistVis dataset, a curated collection of 30,000 synthetic images generated by three state-of-the-art diffusion models using carefully designed prompts depicting universal human activities across different historical periods. We evaluate generated imagery across three key aspects: (1) Implicit Stylistic Associations: examining default visual styles associated with specific eras; (2) Historical Consistency: identifying anachronisms such as modern artifacts in pre-modern contexts; and (3) Demographic Representation: comparing generated racial and gender distributions against historically plausible baselines. Our findings reveal systematic inaccuracies in historically themed generated imagery, as TTI models frequently stereotype past eras by incorporating unstated stylistic cues, introduce anachronisms, and fail to reflect plausible demographic patterns. By offering a scalable methodology and benchmark for assessing historical representation in generated imagery, this work provides an initial step toward building more historically accurate and culturally aligned TTI models.