In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
As part of a 2023 public consultation, people were asked for their opinion on disposable vapes, among other topics. When these responses were analyzed, it was found that they were generated by a bot. Suspicion was raised when researchers found that “responses overwhelmingly opposed restrictions on disposable vape sales.”
A total of 118,756 public responses were submitted to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in the form of multiple-choice questions. An astonishing 76% of them were eventually flagged as fraudulent. Interestingly, 90 833 out of the 90 835 responses answered just one question — the one that sought opinion on restricting disposable vapes.
“This is the first documented instance of large- scale automated/bot interference in a formal public health consultation,” the researchers write. When these bot-generated answers were discarded from the consultation poll, a huge 79.6% majority of respondents actually voted in favor of implementing restrictions on the sale of disposable vapes in the US.
Interestingly, the manipulation effort using AI bots in a public consultation is eerily similar to how Big Tech and Big Tobacco used to engage in lobbying efforts. “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 experts shared in a press statement.
This is the first recorded instance of a coordinated campaign where AI-generated bot activity has been detected, with the goal of influencing public health policymaking. The researchers couldn’t pinpoint the origin of these malicious responses, but the tide is not going to stop any time soon. Banking institutions, governments, and even corporate entities across the globe have warned about an onslaught of attacks powered by AI in the immediate future.
