Spain’s main opposition party has put a deepfake at the centre of its election campaign. The People’s Party this week published a video across its social media channels that uses artificial intelligence to manipulate the likenesses of people linked to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist party, showing them appearing to admit to acts such as soliciting prostitutes and taking kickbacks.
An AI generated version of the prime minister’s wife, Begona Gomez, is made to speak about receiving a university post thanks to her husband’s job, while a fabricated former Socialist president, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, speaks about hiding jewellery in a safe. Both sequences are nods to real investigations in which Gomez and Zapatero have denied any wrongdoing. By Friday the video had been viewed nearly two million times.
The Socialist response was immediate. It is telling people a colossal lie, and for a party to do it on its official accounts seems intolerable to me, Oscar Lopez, Spain’s digital transformation minister, told the broadcaster TVE on Friday. The video did carry a note at the bottom, in tiny, nearly transparent font, saying it had been created with AI. It is very easy for anyone who is not used to AI to confuse that video with reality, Lopez said, and call me crazy, but that seems extremely serious to me.
Spanish coverage adds the legal track. La Vanguardia reported that the video, which clones the voices of current and former Socialist officials as well as Gomez to make them confess to alleged crimes and irregularities, is a response to Sanchez asserting he was left wing and proud during the visit of Argentina’s President Milei to Madrid this week, a story this site covered on October 23, and that the Socialists are considering taking legal action against it. The paper noted that voice replication takes campaign montage a step further, into deepfakes, and that legislation on harm to image and honour lags the technology.
The election is on November 29, called by Sanchez on October 5 after lawmakers rejected his housing reforms. Polling reported earlier this week puts the People’s Party first but short of a majority, which would give Vox the decisive say in forming a government. Whether regulators or courts act on the video before polling day, and whether the PP keeps it online, are the verifiable tests of whether Spain’s rules bite in this campaign or only after it.