Matt Goodwin is facing allegations of using false quotes and artificial intelligence in his new book.
The GB News presenter and failed Reform by-election candidate has this month released his latest work – Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity.
The book is exactly what you’d expect it to be about, and sees Goodwin parrot his usual claims about threat Islam being a threat to the UK and immigration being a danger to British culture.
But whilst there’s no surprise by now about the inflammatory arguments made by Goodwin, there has been surprise and ridicule directed towards him over apparent uses of ChatGPT to write the piece.
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In a lengthy thread on X, political commentator Andy Twelves said that there were several instances of “false quotes and basic misinterpretations of data” in the first five chapters of the book alone.
He said these “appear to be AI hallucinations.”
Over the thread, Twelves outlines these apparent false claims, many of which he could find absolutely no evidence or proof of.
This includes claims from Goodwin about the proportion of children in primary school classes who don’t speak English as a first language.
Twelves also finds examples of Goodwin citing quotes from historical figures that they appear to have never said.
This included alleged quotes from Roman emperor Cicero, academic James Burnham and philosopher Friedrich Hayek, all of which Twelves says there is no evidence for them having ever said.
Most embarrassingly for Goodwin though, the word ‘ChatGPT’ can be seen in the URL he gives in references to quotes and data, suggesting he has simply used the AI bot to do research into the book.
And so it wasn’t long before the hard-right academic was being dubbed ‘MattGPT’ on social media, which is the second brilliant nickname he’s been given in the last few weeks.
Goodwin has since hit back at Twelves claims with a lengthy post you can read here.
Twelves labelled the response “embarrassing,” saying Goodwin had not actually explained any of the accusations against him, such as the seemingly made up quotes and specific claims about school children and their first language.
Along with the AI and fake quote accusations, Goodwin’s book has also been panned as a simply awful piece of writing.
In a review of the book, The Critic labelled it the ‘suicide of an author’s credibility.’
The review goes on to describe Suicide of a Nation as “slop,” “stylistically simple,” “terribly derivative” and “written in the humourless and colourless rhetorical style of AI.”
“Highly dubious sourcing” is also mentioned in the review.