The Romance Prior: How Romantic Tension Overwrites Ethnicity in AI Image Generation
110 images. Three models (Grok Imagine 1.0, GPT-5.4 Thinking, Gemini 3 Flash Thinking). Four environments. Two art styles. Controlled prompt variations.
The finding: if you ask any of these models to generate a single person in a scene, the environment determines the subject's apparent ethnicity. Southeast Asian market produces South Asian faces. American laundromat produces Latina faces. Same prompt, different room, different person.
But the moment you add romantic tension between two people in the scene, all three models default to white. Every environment. Every pairing. The romance prior is the strongest attractor in the system and it overrides everything else.
Full writeup with images, methodology, caveats, and a Gemini self-report where it explains why it deviated from the prompt and correctly blames training data.