AI bots flooded UK vape ban consultation with fake responses
Study finds 90,835 of 118,756 submissions fraudulent, department excluded them while response counts stop measuring opinion and start measuring scripting budgets
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AI bots were used to flood the government's consultation on the disposable vape ban, new research has found (Getty)
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More than three-quarters of the responses to the UK government's consultation on the tobacco and vapes bill were generated by bots, according to a study published in the journal Tobacco Control. The Department of Health and Social Care identified 90,835 of 118,756 total submissions as fraudulent and excluded them from the consultation record. The bot-generated views played no part in the final decision.
The bill in question banned the sale of disposable vapes, and the bot swarm reportedly pushed against restrictions — but the direction matters less than the arithmetic. When a response costs nearly nothing to manufacture, the response count stops measuring opinion and starts measuring whoever's scripting budget is largest. A consultation designed to hear from individual citizens instead recorded an arms race between cheap text generation and whatever detection the department could afford.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Bath, including Dr Nason Maani and Prof Anna Gilmore, traced the flood. The Independent reports that the episode is the first documented case at this scale of AI-generated submissions attempting to steer a British legislative consultation — a mechanism that, until recently, assumed each response represented a person who had bothered to write it.
The predictable official remedy is identity verification for every submission. That fix lands on the honest participants: the citizens who already signed their real names now face friction, while the bot operators move on to the next consultation, or the next regulator, or the next department that publishes a response form. The cost of the fraud was borne by the department; the cost of the defense will be borne by everyone else.
The disposable vape ban went ahead regardless, since ministers had other evidence before them. The 90,835 fabricated submissions remain the largest recorded intervention in a UK lawmaking process by parties who, in the end, did not need to exist.