Sometimes, a nickname comes along so excellently unkind that you know it’s going to stick. One such is “MattGPT” – which will, I suspect, follow former academic and failed Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election Matt Goodwin to his grave.

“MattGPT” is a nickname that will follow former academic and failed Reform candidate Matt Goodwin to his grave

“MattGPT” is a nickname that will follow former academic and failed Reform candidate Matt Goodwin to his grave

The taunt gained traction after the writer Andy Twelves noticed a series of factual errors in Goodwin’s self-published new book Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity. (He seems to have been strongly inspired in theme as well as in choice of title – intellectual homage, or Salieri eyeballing Mozart? – by the success of our own Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.)

Were these, Twelves wondered, the result of AI “hallucinations”? He noticed, after all, that Goodwin left ChatGPT URLs in some of the footnotes. When challenged, Goodwin said crossly he used AI only “to obtain datasets”, claiming that this was standard practice. But Goodwin also included quotations from Cicero, Livy, Roger Scruton, Friedrich Hayek and several others that appeared to have been misattributed or made up out of whole cloth, and for which he has still been unable to supply any satisfactory source. “Made-up quotes,” as Mrs Thatcher put it, “are the........

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