Do artistic styles unconsciously encode gender bias?

Artistic styles aren't neutral filters—they encode gendered visual conventions rooted in historical social hierarchies. Researchers created StyleGender, a dataset linking 19 art historical styles to gender representation, and measured how these patterns transfer to AI-generated images. Text-to-image models don't just copy art history; they amplify gender artifacts beyond what appears in original paintings, suggesting generative AI can magnify latent biases in training data.