AI bots sent three in four responses to UK smoking consultation, report claims

Three quarters of all responses to a UK Government consultation on smoking and vaping came from AI bots, a study has found.

The submissions were overwhelming against restrictions on the sale of disposable vapes.

Researchers said the volume and consistency of the responses suggests a targeted campaign.

However, they said it is “not possible” to discern who was behind it.

The findings come from a study published online in the specialist journal Tobacco Control.

Carried out by Dr Nason Maani of the University of Edinburgh and Professor Anna Gilmore of the University of Bath, it focused on a 2023 call for opinions on Westminster proposals to create a “smoke-free generation” and tackle vaping by young people.

The UK’s Tobacco and Vapes Act received Royal Assent in April this year, making it illegal to sell tobacco products to those born on or after 1 January 2009, and restricting the supply and sale of throw-away vapes.

Close to 119,000 responses were submitted to the consultation – almost 91,000 of which were identified as fraudulent.

As a whole, survey respondents were opposed to new rules on throw-away vapes – but when the bot responses were excluded, three quarters of valid respondents supported change.

The bot responses were detected by the Department of Health and Social Care and all targeted a single multiple-choice question opposing proposed restrictions on the sale of disposable vapes.

The same number indicated that they had learned of the consultation through social media.

There is increasing concern about the spread of health misinformation by AI systems and on social media. The researchers say their results show what may be “the first documented instance of large-scale automated interference in a formal public health policy consultation”.

The researchers said: “While it is not possible to ascertain the commercial origins of such a campaign, transnational tobacco companies have sought to swamp earlier public consultations with favourable responses, using mass recruitment campaigns and postcard submissions.

 “The scale and directional consistency of bot responses [in this instance] suggest a coordinated campaign, consistent with prior evidence of tobacco industry efforts to manipulate public consultations through mass coordinated submissions.”

The team requested metadata and demographic information on the respondents from the Department of Health and Social Care, but this was deemed ineligible under Freedom of Information rules, and they were unable to independently verify the bot detection methods used by the government.

The report states: “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.”