Admittedly not EU per se, but Europe nonetheless:
https://ash.org.uk/uploads/Use-of-vapes-among-young-people-GB-2023-v2.pdf
See figs 2, 3 and 4.
Particularly the 18-year old cohort as relevant to this conversation.
38% 'ever used' and 18% actively currently using e-cigarettes.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9932
Considering the nature of the activity, these figures are more likely to be on the low side of truth as well.
ITC study found that 24% of people aged 16-to-19 years in England reported having vaped in the past 30 days in 2022.*
*Done in UK, US and England.
In England again, a study of ~180k showed in 2023 that the proportion long-term actively vaping is now 10%, from 4% in 2021, and only 1.3% in 2013.
At 10%, that's 6.6 Million vapers in the UK.
Considering active research since the 90s in desperate hunt to be the next big public health discovery has not yet managed to come up with any actual negative effects of vaping save the rise in BP from Nico comparable to a cup of coffee, and how surprisingly many say nicotine improved their mental health (see the ash study) myself included, I'd say it's unlikely people are going to stop any time soon either.
Not at all, but as an accurate representation of who felt what? Yeah it's not the best source. Music is also specifically less so, because it's too abstract to really be propagandistic apart from the vague aesthetic of grandiosity.
It very much is, actually.
Earnest [adjective] - resulting from or showing sincere and intense conviction.
A sincere intense conviction in gathering a generic dataset representative of the very broad concept of "images" in order to be the source from which future researchers can train a diffuser model as a proof of concept, to create patterns represented in those images out of randomised noise, driven by scientific pursuit and uncontaminated with the subjectivity of artistic taste is about as fitting for "earnest" as can be.
Remember, I wasn't talking about only the outputs of any given model, but the dataset itself.
Yeah, the outputs definitely are, but derivative of an earnest representation of us. That makes it an interesting and unbiased account of what our images really are like.
It's interesting to go on SD and consider an idea, a concept, and what image it conjures in your head, then proompt and see what kind of images it conjures from the model. The difference is the difference in bias. It's an interesting reality check.
So is most human works. If anything, the randomness of noise, even by processor's famously incapable of any such thing, is going to be far more unpredictable than the copying done by humans.
In itself though I don't think that inherently makes either less valuable, all originality only exists as both an evolution of and in contrast to the established and accepted, and that is achieved by derivative works, perhaps even creating a genre.
If anything, part of the problem is that AI art is too original, sometimes inventing 6 fingers, or 7, the form is broken, and the idea of any image no longer resonates.
Personally I don't. I don't think there's anything that makes them any more artificial than any human work.
Ultimately all are a human vision - an image generator is just a lot of fancy matrices in a file without human input, neither it nor Photoshop can make everything by themselves.
All are ultimately .jpegs, products not of some singular vision but also of the tools developed and available to the human, all are concepts so far removed from nature, labeling one artificial but not the other is splitting hairs on a head freshly and cleanly shaved by a precision engineered mass manufactured machine shipped half-way across the world in system so complex most people don't understand it.
Oh come on now. You can hate AI without resorting to delusion or ignorance.
Not only is AI art on the rise, but even a year or two ago the tools for generating images were good enough that it's already seeing noticeable widespread use, including in the physical world. And that's not even touching on the strides and accomplishments in the LLM space.
I'm not writing anything off as is hopefully evident by my writing here, it's moreso that the value of it as I see it is perhaps overestimated by yourself.