Study: AI Bots Sent 76% of Responses to 2023 Vapes Consultation

AI bots sent tens of thousands of fake responses to a UK government consultation in a failed attempt to block the ban on disposable vapes. Three-quarters of all replies to the 2023 consultation on the tobacco and vapes bill were machine-generated.

The finding comes from research published on Tuesday in the journal Tobacco Control. Its authors are Dr Nason Maani of the University of Edinburgh and Prof Anna Gilmore of the University of Bath. It is thought to be the first coordinated attempt to use AI to derail health policymaking in the UK.

The numbers

The Department of Health and Social Care used bot-detection methods to find that 90,835 of the 118,756 responses it received were automated. That is 76%. All but two of those answered the same question in the "smoke free generation" consultation. They opposed the Sunak government's plan to ban disposable vapes. The department said the submissions were "often duplicated many times and sent at high frequency from a small number of IP addresses".

The researchers called it "the first documented instance of large-scale automated interference in a formal public health policy consultation". The department excluded all 90,835 responses from its decision-making. Keir Starmer's Labour government inherited the bill in 2024 and passed it, including the ban on businesses selling or supplying disposable vapes.

Reactions

Maani said this attempt was caught, but "the threat is that future campaigns become harder to catch, and what we can't catch, we don't know about". Such campaigns, he said, raise the possibility of "a handful of powerful interests looking like a mass movement".

Caroline Cerny, deputy chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, called the evidence "deeply concerning". She pointed to the tobacco industry's history of seeking to undermine public health regulation and called for safeguards. Decisions on public health, she said, must rest on sound evidence, not "manipulated response numbers".

Azzurra Moores of the thinktank Demos described the attempt as "pretty alarming". Consultations are a main way government opens its decision-making, she said. She noted there are no easy answers: every barrier that keeps bots out also makes it harder for real people to take part, and AI makes fake responses harder to spot.

The department said its "robust controls" identified the attempt. Its spokesperson said the fake responses were removed and the consultation helped inform the action to create a smoke-free generation. The department will stay alert to such interference in future, the spokesperson added.

Source: The Guardian