AI bots flooded 2023 UK government consultation on disposable vapes ban

Three-quarters of all responses were machine-generated in failed attempt to stop bill from passing into law, research finds

AI bots flooded a government consultation with tens of thousands of fake responses in a failed attempt to stop the UK’s ban on disposable vapes.

Three-quarters of all the responses to the 2023 consultation on the tobacco and vapes bill were machine-generated, in what is thought to be the first coordinated attempt to use AI to derail health policymaking in the UK.

The attempt to manipulate the outcome of the consultation was disclosed on Tuesday in research published in the journal Tobacco Control by the health policy experts Dr Nason Maani, from the University of Edinburgh, and Prof Anna Gilmore, of the University of Bath.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) used bot-detection methods to identify that 90,835 of the 118,756 responses it received, 76%, were submitted by bots.

All but two of those 90,835 automated responses answered the same question in the “smoke free generation” consultation, in which they opposed Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government’s plan to ban disposable vapes. The submissions were “often duplicated many times and sent at high frequency from a small number of IP addresses”, the DHSC said.

The bombardment “appears to be the first documented instance of large-scale automated interference in a formal public health policy consultation”, the researchers said.

Maani added that while this attempt was identified, “the threat is that future campaigns become harder to catch, and what we can’t catch, we don’t know about. Such campaigns are a threat because they raise the possibility of a handful of powerful interests looking like a mass movement.”