Evidence map›Paper›PMID 39884867›Full record

ArticleTobacco control2026

Generative AI in a new era of computer model-informed tobacco research: a short report.

Julia Vassey, Chris J Kennedy, Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Jennifer B Unger

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Tobacco control, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
2citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

2 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. E-cigarette and Cannabis in Social Media Influencer Marketing and Its Effect on Adolescents: A Survey-Based Experiment.Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco · 2026
    Article
  2. Artificial Intelligence Approximates Human Affect Ratings of Cannabis Images.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors.

Julia VasseyDepartment of Population and Public Health Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA vassey@usc.edu.ORCID 0000-0003-3002-2000
Chris J KennedyCenter for Precision Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.ORCID 0000-0001-7444-2766
Ho-Chun Herbert ChangDepartment of Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.ORCID 0000-0002-0056-2527
Jennifer B UngerDepartment of Population and Public Health Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA.ORCID 0000-0001-9064-6603

Funding

USC Tobacco Center of Regulatory ScienceU54CA180905 · NCI · UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA · PI Jessica Louise Barrington-Trimis · 2018 to 2026
$39.0M
NCI NIH HHS U54CA180905NIH HHS 1R01CA260459-01
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundSocial media influencers who promote e-cigarettes on Instagram or TikTok for tobacco brands use marketing tactics to increase the appeal of their promotional content, for example, depicting e-cigarettes alongside healthy lifestyle or entertainment imagery that could decrease youths' risk perceptions of e-cigarettes. Monitoring the prevalence of such content on social media using computer vision and generative AI (artificial intelligence) can provide valuable data for tobacco regulatory science (TRS).

methodsWe selected 102 Instagram and TikTok videos posted by micro-influencers in 2021-2024 who promoted e-cigarettes alongside posts featuring four themes: cannabis, entertainment, fashion or healthy lifestyle. We used OpenAI's GPT-4o multimodal large-scale visual linguistic model to detect the presence of nicotine vaping, cannabis vaping, fashion, entertainment and healthy lifestyle. The model did not require any additional training and improved its performance as we modified the text prompt.

resultsThe model's accuracy was 87% for nicotine vaping, 96% for cannabis vaping, 99% for fashion, 96% for entertainment and 98% for healthy lifestyle.

conclusionsGenerative AI can achieve accurate object detection with zero-shot learning (no additional training of the pretrained model). This model can be applied to big data-scale sample sizes of images and videos to detect e-cigarette-related and other substance-related promotional content and contexts (eg, healthy lifestyle) used for the promotion of these products on social media, providing valuable data for TRS.

Indexed as

Artificial IntelligenceElectronic Nicotine Delivery SystemsSocial MediaVapingHumansMarketingTobacco ProductsAdvertising and PromotionCo-substance useElectronic nicotine delivery devicesNicotineSurveillance and monitoring

Identifiers

PMID39884867
PMCPMC13151426

What Socratic holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY-NC
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.