Spain's PP deepfakes prime minister's wife in campaign ad, and the backlash is fierce

A legal challenge landed Friday against Spain's conservative People's party over a campaign video built with artificial intelligence. Leire Díez, a former Socialist party member whose likeness was used, accused the PP of defamation and digital identity theft in a court complaint reported by The Guardian. She wants the ad pulled immediately. By Friday, the video had racked up nearly 2m views across the party's social media accounts.

The spot does more than tinker with faces. It uses AI to make people tied to Pedro Sánchez's Socialists appear to confess to soliciting prostitutes and taking kickbacks. An AI-generated version of Sánchez's wife, Begoña Gómez, talks about landing a university post thanks to her husband's job. A deepfake of former Socialist president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero talks about stashing jewellery in a safe. Both nods point to ongoing investigations in which Gómez and Zapatero have denied wrongdoing. A note at the bottom, in tiny near-transparent font, says the video was made with AI.

The Socialists hit back fast. Digital transformation minister Óscar López told TVE on Friday that the party is telling people a colossal lie, and doing it from official accounts is intolerable to him. He flagged the bigger worry: anyone not used to AI can easily mistake that video for reality. Call him crazy, he said, but that strikes him as extremely serious.

Legally, the PP may be in the clear. A majority of nine legal experts consulted by El País agreed the video wasn't illegal, since it was labelled as AI and reads as political satire. Íñigo Navarro, a former law dean at Madrid's Comillas Pontifical University, told the paper everyone knows those people didn't say those things. Criminal law professor Juan Antonio Lascuraín drew the line elsewhere: whether it's appropriate, exemplary or ethically and politically correct is quite another matter.

Researchers aren't shrugging. José Javier Olivas, who studies populism, conspiracy theories and AI biases at Spain's National University for Distance Education, called it truly regrettable that a party claiming to want to govern and revitalise democracy is deploying deepfakes in its campaign. He said it crosses a red line for how campaigns normally run. Putting words in other people's mouths that they never said, he argued, qualifies as disinformation.

The PP isn't apologising. Borja Sémper told reporters there'd be a problem only if the party meant for people to believe the characters were real, adding that everyone can see it's a digital tool aimed at Socialist hypocrisy. The row fits a global pattern: the Wesleyan Media Project has identified more than 200 AI-generated political ads this cycle, mostly tied to Republicans, with co-director Erika Franklin Fowler noting much of the AI use carries no disclaimer. Spain votes on 29 November, and most polls suggest the PP wins but needs far-right Vox to govern.