Does the public comment system have an AI problem?

Last year, when an air quality agency in Southern California proposed a new rule to encourage consumers to buy heat pumps instead of gas heaters, the agency was flooded with 20,000 comments opposing the idea—many more than usual. “Due to the volume and nature of these submissions, South Coast AQMD had concerns about their authenticity,” says Rainbow Yeung, an agency spokesperson. The agency’s executive director got an email thanking him for his “opposition” to a rule that his own team had drafted. To check the validity of the comments, the agency reached out to a small sample of commenters—172 people—to confirm that they’d actually sent the emails. Almost no one responded. But of the five people who did, three of them said that they didn’t know anything about the comments that had been submitted in their own names. In a separate investigation, a campaigner from the Sierra Club also started contacting people on the list; the four people he reached also said that they h