Right-wing political candidate, Matthew Goodwin, who ran for Reform UK in the Gorton and Denton by-election has been accused of using AI to write his recently published book. Goodwin, who lost the by-election to the Green Party’s Hannah Spencer MP published a new book Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, which The Spectator’s Andy Twelves reports emulates Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, which was published in 2017.
Twelves, who examined Goodwin’s book closely, has also called it out for tell-tale signs of using Chat-GPT. Journalist, Andy Twelves received a copy of the book and read it cover to cover before publishing his findings in a piece for The Spectator.
Goodwin’s book, which is his second ‘non-academic’ book to publish opens: “There are moments in the life of a nation when everything changes – not with a bang, not even with a conscious decision, but with a quiet, creeping loss of confidence so profound that a people start to forget who they are.”
In his analysis of the book, Twelves explains: “Anybody who has used Chat-GPT will recognise the tell-tale signs of possible AI writing, such as the ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ comparisons and the strange obsession with things being quiet or silent.”
In The Spectator, Twleves adds: “we can see, at the very least, that ChatGPT helped with parts of his book, because he left the ChatGPT URL in some of the few references used to justify his arguments. Goodwin says that he only used AI to obtain datasets and cross-checked them.”
When accused by Andy Twelves of using Chat-GPT, Goodwin denied the allegations. During a segment on GBNews, Goodwin ironically said he ran the book through Chat-GPT which said “This does not read like an AI written book.” It is widely acknowledged though that ChatGPT and other similar AI models are trained to be polite and agreeable, and will therefore often agree with a person, reflecting the bias of their own question input.
In clips from GBNews, a show on which Goodwin is actually a presenter, Matt Goodwin and Andy Twelves debated the use of AI in this work, as well as what Twelves describes as intentional misinterpretation or misunderstanding of data.
During the programme, Twelves admits that he is not an expert nor has he written a peer-reviewed study, however, he had connected with Professor Steve Strand OBE from the University of Oxford who highlighted misunderstandings of EAL (English as an Additional Language) throughout the book.
Twelves also claims that within the book, Goodwin manufactures an Ofsted inspection report from a school; the book reads “One inspection report put it bluntly. Many pupils join the school with extremely limited English. This significantly slows the pace of learning.” When Andy Twelves checked the school in question, which was named in a BirminghamLive article, reading ever single inspection report on their Ofsted site he found that no such quote like that truly exists.
In the live tv segment, which was shared online by Politics Joe, Goodwin also claimed that “Every single demographic projection in this book was reviewed by some of the world’s leading demographers” but when asked by Twelves who those demographers were, Goodwin was unable to name them.
