Huge swarm of AI bots flooded vape ban consultation to influence outcome, study finds

AI bots flooded a government consultation with thousands of responses in an attempt to influence the UK’s ban on disposable vapes, a new study has found.

More than three quarters of the responses to the government’s vapes and tobacco bill consultation in 2023 were generated by bots as part as a failed attempt to stop the legislation, according to the analysis published in the journal Tobacco Control on Tuesday.

Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) identified 90,835 of the 118,756 responses as fraudulent and excluded them from the consultation report, meaning the views submitted by the bots were not taken into account in final decision making.

It is thought to be the first time AI has been used to coordinate an attempt to interfere a major health policy in the UK. However, researchers Dr Nason Maani, from the University of Edinburgh, and Prof Anna Gilmore, of the University of Bath, said the aim of the bots is “not known”.

The study found all the bot-generated responses consisted solely of multiple-choice selections, and that all but two targeted a single question opposing proposed restrictions on disposable vape sales, with the same number reporting they had learnt of the consultation through social media.

Once bot responses were excluded, researchers said 79.6 per cent of valid respondents supported restrictions on disposable vape sales - the reverse of what the unfiltered dataset would have shown.

“This appears to be the first documented instance of large-scale automated interference in a formal public health policy consultation,” the paper reads.

Researchers added the scale and consistency of the bot responses suggested a “coordinated campaign” that was consistent with “prior evidence of tobacco industry efforts to manipulate public consultations through mass coordinated submissions”.

They warned that as bot sophistication increases, it will become increasingly important to detect and safeguard democratic processes from AI interference.

“As bot sophistication increases and public consultations expand across regulatory contexts, strengthening detection capacity and governance safeguards will be essential to maintaining the integrity of public health policymaking, particularly in lower-resource settings where screening infrastructure may be absent,” they wrote.

Speaking to The Guardian Caroline Cerny, the deputy chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, said: “Evidence that AI bots have been used to swamp a Department of Health consultation is deeply concerning.

“Given the tobacco industry’s history of seeking to undermine public health regulation, we need to be alert to the risk that technological advances can be used to further commercial interests around health policy and put safeguards in place.

“Decisions that affect public health must be based on sound evidence and expertise, not manipulated response numbers.”