Matt Goodwin’s New Anti-Immigration Book ‘Based on AI Hallucinations’

Defeated Reform parliamentary candidate Matt Goodwin has been accused of using ChatGPT to research his latest book.

Goodwin, the GB News presenter who contested the Gorton and Denton byelection last month, published Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity on 16 March.

Early readers of the book say that it includes fake quotes, cites non-existent articles and relies on “AI hallucinations” to make statistical claims.

“I’m only 5 chapters in and have found a huge amount of what appears to be false quotes and basic misinterpretations of data that appear to be AI hallucinations,” wrote Andy Twelves, a New Statesman contributor, in a long thread on X.

Twelves accused Goodwin of “statistical illiteracy” regarding the claim that most primary schoolchildren in Leicester, Luton and Slough do not speak English as a “main language”. Children who grow up speaking an additional language at home are more than capable of speaking English fluently or as a “main language” at school, Twelves pointed out.

Goodwin’s book also includes quotations from Roman statesman Cicero, economist Friedrich Hayek and political theorist James Burnham – but Twelves claims that none of the quotes exist in the public domain. 

John Merrick, deputy editor of The Break-Down, pointed out that several of the book’s footnotes include ChatGPT in the URL – meaning the source of information was not found by Goodwin, but generated by the AI chatbot. 

“If the research of Goodwin’s book was conducted mainly by AI, then he’s done a terrible job of hiding it,” Merrick wrote on X.

He added that there are only 12 footnotes in the book, with five referring to Goodwin’s own Substack and two generated by ChatGPT. 

Multiple X users who have criticised Goodwin’s methods claim that he has since blocked them.

Goodwin responded: “Everything in this book is based on official UK census data and the very same projections that are used by the Office for National Statistics and expert demographers.”

He added: “The Left don’t want you to read it, they don’t want you to know what is in this book, because they do not want you to know what is happening around you.”

Goodwin was a professor of politics at the University of Kent for nine years until 2024. In February he ran for MP against Green candidate and plumber Hannah Spencer, who won the vote by a margin of over 4,000.

Sophia Sheera is a journalist in Novara Media’s social media team.