False Claims, Credible Images: A Red-Teaming Benchmark for Commercial Image Generators

Zeyu Ye, Yanchun Li, Sibei He, Meng Xie, Hangtao Zhang +6

Image-generation models can now produce text-rich, natural-looking visual artifacts that are hard to distinguish from real-world evidence, such as news reports and textbook pages. Yet, the same capability introduces a new risk: these models can just as easily fabricate visual misinformation. Even commercial models (e.g., GPT-Image-2) readily produce it. Curiously, we find that these models can recognize a claim as false when asked, yet still render that very claim as credible visual evidence. This discrepancy points to a blind spot in current alignment: safeguards judge what an image shows, not what it asserts; however, existing red-teaming benchmarks target conventional harmful content, such as violent or explicit imagery, and say little about where the alignment boundaries lie for visual misinformation, especially in commercial models. To fill this gap, we introduce EpiReal-Bench, the first systematic benchmark for evaluating visual misinformation risks in commercial image generators, comprising 10k false-claim prompts and 10k corresponding generated images that span 10 real-world claim categories and 10 credible visual formats. We further introduce EpiReal-Attack, a…