Provenance record

AI bots flooded 2023 UK government consultation on disposable vapes ban

The Guardian: Artificial Intelligence (tier 1, news) 2026-10-27T22:30:45.000Z Original ↗

Discourse valence

-50

Adverse

confidence 80% · 1 item

-100

-50

+50

+100

-50

Adverse readingFavourable reading

Single-model reading. This item did not meet the threshold for a multi-model panel.

Governance and regulation Synthetic media and manipulation Concentration of power

Excerpt as ingested

Three-quarters of all responses were machine-generated in failed attempt to stop bill from passing into law, research finds 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. Continue reading...

Every model that read this

Model	Provider	Stage	Score	Conf.	Latency	Prompt	When
Llama 3.3 70B	Meta	analysis	-50	80%	4565ms	v1.0.0 / m1.0.1	2026-10-28 00:17

Llama 3.3 70B · reading

AI bots generated fake responses to influence policy.

evidence: reported horizon: n/a

Evidence extracted

AI bots flooded UK government consultation with fake responses
Three-quarters of responses were machine-generated

The chain

SOURCE     The Guardian: Artificial Intelligence (tier 1)
   ↓
DOCUMENT   5a5b4a42-fca0-474e-90ea-a76b0763d17b
           https://theguardian.com/society/2026/oct/27/ai-bots-flooded-2023-uk-government-consultation-disposable-vapes-ban
   ↓
EVIDENCE   2 extracted excerpts
   ↓
MODEL RUN  1 run, methodology 1.0.1
   ↓
SCORE      -50  (Adverse)
   ↓
CONFIDENCE 80%