Adversarial Nibbler: An Open Red-Teaming Method for Identifying Diverse Harms in Text-to-Image Generation

With text-to-image (T2I) generative AI models reaching wide audiences, it is critical to evaluate model robustness against non-obvious attacks to mitigate the generation of offensive images. By focusing on “implicitly adversarial” prompts (those that trigger T2I models to generate unsafe images for non-obvious reasons), we isolate a set of difficult safety issues that human creativity is well-suited to uncover. To this end, we built the Adversarial Nibbler Challenge, a red-teaming methodology for crowdsourcing a diverse set of implicitly adversarial prompts. We have assembled a suite of state-of-the-art T2I models, employed a simple user interface to identify and annotate harms, and engaged diverse populations to capture long-tail safety issues that may be overlooked in standard testing. We present an in-depth account of our methodology, a systematic study of novel attack strategies and safety failures, and a visualization tool for easy exploration of the dataset. The first challenge round resulted in over 10k prompt-image pairs with machine annotations for safety. A subset of 1.5k samples contains rich human annotations of harm types and attack styles. Our findings emphasize the necessity of continual auditing and adaptation as new vulnerabilities emerge. This work will enable proactive, iterative safety assessments and promote responsible development of T2I models.