After losing the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election to a left-wing plumber, reformist Matthew Goodwin has published a new book. National suicide: immigration, Islam, and identity.
It’s clear that Goodwin was trying to emulate Douglas Murray’s style. The strange death of Europe: immigration, identity, Islam, Published in 2017. The catchphrase and general thesis are almost the same. But while we are certain that Murray did not use AI to write his book, we cannot say with the same certainty about Goodwin’s effort, which begins:
“There are moments in the life of a country when everything changes. It’s not a shock, it’s not even a conscious decision, but it’s a quiet, creeping loss of confidence so profound that people begin to forget who they are.”
Anyone who has used Chat-GPT will notice telltale signs of possible AI writing, such as “not X, but Y” comparisons and a strange obsession with how quiet or silent things are.
“The sloppiness doesn’t end here.”
Coincidence? perhaps. Goodwin responded to my criticisms by calling them “false and false.” He also said elsewhere that left-wing critics clearly haven’t read his books and don’t use as many references as academic books in trying to appeal to a mass audience. But at least we can see that ChatGPT was helpful in some of his books. That’s because he left the ChatGPT URL among the few references used to justify his claims. Goodwin said the only time they used AI was to take data sets and cross-check them.
Many of his analyzes seem to refer to events, places, and people that do not exist. This is another sign that writers frequently rely on large-scale language models (LLMs) that “hallucinate” facts.
Consider Goodwin’s argument about British schools. He cited reports that in one Bradford classroom, only four out of 28 pupils spoke English as their first language, leaving teachers to mediate between “dozens of languages”. No reports were found to support this claim, and Goodwin does not provide any sources in his book. This case seems similar to the response you get when you type “Find an alarming case of English proficiency in elementary school” into ChatGPT and press Enter.
Mr Goodwin also cited a 2019 BBC West Midlands report about schools where pupils speak 30 languages. There is also no record found regarding this report. What’s strange is that there are so many stories Goodwin could quote, including Birmingham. In 2021, subway and birmingham mail For example, I write about Watermill Primary School in Selly Oak, where 31 languages were spoken. But if Goodwin had read those reports, he would have found that Watermill was one of the top 2 percent rated schools in the nation at the time.
Instead, Goodwin cites “inspection reports” that show “many students enter school with very limited English proficiency.” Again, after reading multiple Ofsted reports about schools where multiple languages are spoken, I found no reference to this quote. Ofsted reports reiterate that these schools are generally good at their job, pupils make outstanding progress and support for English as an additional language is effective. But perhaps this is not the case with Goodwin’s story.
The sloppiness doesn’t end here. Goodwin’s famous quotes include Cicero, Hayek, Roger Scruton, Livy, Noah Webster, James Burnham, and Walker Connor. In some ways, it’s an impressive feat. “The most dangerous experiment is one carried out on society as a whole,” is a line that Goodwin attributes to Hayek, even though there is no other record of it. The most dangerous experiment seems to be publishing a book without any fact-checking.
As you read this book, at some point you have to ask: Did Goodwin verify any of his claims? Did he open a book he wrote? Or did I just accept whatever the AI chatbot spewed out because I sounded so vaguely informed? After I posted about the mistakes in his book, Goodwin implied that I was a “left-wing troll” and thanked me for boosting sales. He did not address the use of the seemingly false quote or identify its source. To be fair, he has been invited to debate the veracity of his book on GB News next week, and I’m really looking forward to that.
Mr. Goodwin has no real excuse for the inaccuracies in his book. At one time he was a highly regarded academic at the University of Kent. If one of his students had submitted a paper with a non-existent hallucinatory citation or bibliography, he clearly would have failed. Unfortunately, the academic rigor Goodwin once possessed seems to have long since disappeared.
