Identifying Prompted Artist Names from Generated Images

June 2025

Identifying Prompted Artist Names from Generated Images

Authors:

Grace Su

Abstract:

A common and controversial use of text-to-image models is to generate pictures by explicitly naming artists, such as "in the style of Greg Rutkowski". We introduce a benchmark for prompted-artist recognition: predicting which artist names were invoked in the prompt from the image alone. The dataset contains 1.95M images covering 110 artists and spans four generalization settings: held-out artists, increasing prompt complexity, multiple-artist prompts, and different text-to-image models. We evaluate feature similarity baselines, contrastive style descriptors, data attribution methods, supervised classifiers, and few-shot prototypical networks. Generalization patterns vary: supervised and few-shot models excel on seen artists and complex prompts, whereas style descriptors transfer better when the artist's style is pronounced; multi-artist prompts remain the most challenging. Our benchmark reveals substantial headroom and provides a public testbed to advance the responsible moderation of text-to-image models. We release the dataset and benchmark to foster further research: https://graceduansu.github.io/IdentifyingPromptedArtists/
@mastersthesis{Su-2025-147834,
author = {Grace Su},
title = {Identifying Prompted Artist Names from Generated Images},
year = {2025},
month = {June},
school = {Carnegie Mellon University},
address = {Pittsburgh, PA},
number = {CMU-RI-TR-25-51},
}
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