Key facts
- 76% of responses to a 2023 UK consultation on disposable vapes were machine-generated.
- 90,835 of 118,756 total responses were identified as automated.
- The automated responses opposed the plan to ban disposable vapes.
- The submissions were duplicated and sent from a small number of IP addresses.
AI bots flooded a UK government consultation on banning disposable vapes with tens of thousands of fake responses, an attempt to manipulate public health policy that was detected and excluded. Researchers Nason Maani and Anna Gilmore found that 76% of the 118,756 responses to the 2023 consultation were machine-generated, marking what is believed to be the first coordinated use of AI to derail health policy-making in the UK. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) used bot-detection methods to identify and remove the 90,835 automated submissions, which largely opposed the planned ban on disposable vapes. The Labour government later passed the ban into law.