AI bots flooded 2023 UK government consultation on disposable vapes ban

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.”

The DHSC excluded the 90,835 automated responses from its decision-making. Keir Starmer’s Labour government inherited the tobacco and vapes bill in 2024 and passed it into law, including the ban on businesses selling or supplying disposable vapes.

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.”

Azzurra Moores, the associate director for information ecosystems at the thinktank Demos, described the attempt to derail the ban as “pretty alarming”.

“Public consultations are one of the main ways government opens up its decision-making, so any interference with them is a serious concern,” she said. “These findings are pretty alarming: if a consultation can be swamped like this, it stops telling policymakers what the public actually thinks and undermines trust in the process.

“This is a problem without easy answers. Every barrier that keeps bots out also makes it harder for real people to take part, and AI makes fake responses far harder to spot. Interference can adapt faster than departments can update their checks. Better screening and more transparency will help, but there’s no single fix.”

The DHSC said its “robust controls” identified the attempt to influence the consultation.

A spokesperson said: “We always have robust controls in place to prevent the manipulation of our public consultations, and those controls worked effectively in this case.

“As a result, the fake responses were removed, and the consultation helped inform the landmark action we are taking to create a smoke-free generation.

“We will remain alert to interference of this kind in future consultation processes, and we will not be deterred from doing what is necessary to promote healthier living.”