Houda Elmimouni

Recent developments in generative AI enable the rapid production of lifelike images, but these tools often reproduce cultural stereotypes for underrepresented groups. We adopt a cross-regional, qualitative-dominant exploratory design to examine how text-to-image (T2I) systems portray African identities and how community members interpret these portrayals. The study combines a controlled image-generation task with semi-structured interviews with 18 participants from North and West Africa (Nigeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco). Participants generated images of everyday portraits, traditional attire during celebration, a professional context, and a speculative future depiction. Focusing on “traditional attire”, we identify three recurring interpretive tensions participants used to diagnose cultural misrepresentation: accessories (e.g., beads) functioning as shallow cultural proof, garment-semantics collapse when textiles, cuts, and named garments are missing, and temporal collapse in which living tradition is rendered as museum-era costume. We show how participants draw on garment knowledge and temporal reasoning to assess authenticity, and we argue that participants’ accounts suggest that culturally situated representation cannot be reduced to prompt-level debiasing alone.

HCI in Africa is growing yet fragmented and underrepresented globally. We map 2002–2024 activity via a bibliometric scan of 500+ papers ( 300 venues) and an institutional survey in 11 countries, situating results by population, connectivity, and policy readiness, and including work outside HCI labels (e.g., NGOs, tech hubs). We find a post-2020 rise in Africa-led publications and sharper venue stratification: mainstream venues feature mixed teams, while local outlets host much Africa-centered work; teaching shows strong pockets amid capacity, resource, and curriculum constraints. We contribute (1) a continent-scale, context-aware map of authorship and venues; (2) design provocations beyond expansionist logics; and (3) actionable steps for reviewers, venues, and institutions, supported by an open corpus and interactive dashboard.