AI Bots Made 76% of Responses to UK Vape Consultation

The Guardian reports that AI bots submitted 90,835 of the 118,756 responses, or 76%, to a 2023 UK government consultation on tobacco and vape policy. Nearly all the automated responses opposed a proposed ban on disposable vapes.

The UK Department of Health and Social Care found that the submissions were often duplicated and sent at high frequency from a small number of IP addresses. The department excluded them from its decision making, and the ban later became law.

Researchers Nason Maani of the University of Edinburgh and Anna Gilmore of the University of Bath published the findings in Tobacco Control. They described the campaign as the first documented case of large scale automated interference in a formal public health consultation.

"The threat is that future campaigns become harder to catch, and what we can't catch, we don't know about," Maani said.