Matt Goodwin caught using AI in bigoted book

Matt Goodwin hasn’t had a great past month. In February 2026, Goodwin was trounced in the Gorton and Denton by-election by the Greens’ Hannah Spencer. Less than four weeks later, he’s now trying to defend ‘his’ awful, Islamophobic new book after parts – perhaps much – of it were found to be derived from AI chatbots.

Not only that, but his editing was so sloppy that he even left tell-tale ChatGPT indicators in links he puts in the book. What’s more, he can’t blame anyone else for the sloppiness – because he’d already boasted about having “no major publisher”, supposedly because “they would have censored me”.

Goodwin exposed

The exposure of Goodwin’s AI-dodge came in a thread from observant writer and X user Andy Twelves. Twelves found a host of false claims that he described as “AI hallucinations”. Below are a few extracts from the thread:

Some of the errors were schoolboy stuff – if an AI chatbot were a schoolboy. Like a made-up claim about languages spoken in a school – that attributes the claim to a non-existent BBC service:

Goodwin wouldn’t be Goodwin if he didn’t throw in a bit of gratuitous reference to classics and academics. In this case, gratuitous also means non-existent:

And – of course – some trans-bashing, apparently based on equally made-up sources:

And some equally ill-founded migrant-bashing:

And, of course, we shouldn’t omit the AI-slop indicators:

Even more embarrassing for Goodwin, Twelves said he had only done the first five chapters so far:

FAFO

In a long X rant about horrid left-wingers, Goodwin wrote that he sees “no issue obtaining datasets via AI so long as they are cross-checked with the original source.” Well, maybe – but it seems they weren’t ‘cross-checked’, were they?

This is not Goodwin’s first brush with, well, making stuff up. He was clinically dismantled by journalist Mehdi Hasan in 2024 for making completely false claims that more than tripled the number of immigrants in London housing and could only lamely respond that he’d need to look it up. Hasan saved him the trouble. The clip is well worth a watch:

Featured image via the Canary