Leire Díez files criminal complaint against Spain’s PP over AI impersonation video

Spain’s digital transformation minister, Óscar López, warned on October 23 that viewers unfamiliar with AI could mistake the People’s Party’s campaign deepfake for reality. The video depicts Socialist-linked figures apparently admitting wrongdoing and carries an AI notice in tiny, nearly transparent type—a disclosure now central to the dispute over the party’s use of fabricated statements.

The conservative People’s Party, known as the PP, published the video across its social media channels this week. It used AI to manipulate the likenesses of people connected to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party, making them appear to acknowledge conduct including taking kickbacks and soliciting prostitutes. These were generated portrayals, not recordings of those people making admissions.

One sequence gives Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, a fabricated statement about receiving a university post because of her husband’s position. Another depicts former Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero speaking about hiding jewellery in a safe. Both passages refer to ongoing investigations; Gómez and Zapatero have denied wrongdoing.

By Friday, October 23, the video had accumulated nearly two million views, according to the Guardian. Its circulation comes ahead of Spain’s November 29 general election, giving the dispute an immediate campaign setting rather than leaving it as an abstract argument about synthetic media.

Speaking to broadcaster TVE on Friday, López objected both to the false statements and to their distribution through official party accounts. He called the video a “colossal lie” and said that publication by a political party made it intolerable. His warning focused on people who might not recognize how AI had been used.

The PP rejected that interpretation. Party representative Borja Sémper told reporters that malicious intent to make viewers believe the characters were real would be a problem. But he maintained that viewers could see the video was using digital tools to expose what the party called Socialist hypocrisy.

José Javier Olivas, an associate professor at Spain’s National University for Distance Education who researches populism, conspiracy theories and AI biases, challenged that defense. He described putting invented words into other people’s mouths as disinformation and called the video a campaign “red line.”

It’s quite another matter to ask whether it’s appropriate, exemplary or ethically and politically correct.

Leire Díez, a former Socialist party member whose likeness appears in the video, filed a legal challenge against the PP on October 23 seeking its immediate removal. Her complaint reportedly alleges defamation and digital identity theft. Her generated portrayal alludes to accusations that she sought to undermine judicial and law-enforcement bodies to help the Socialists.

The Guardian reported that a majority of nine legal experts consulted by El País considered the video lawful, citing its AI label and its overall tone of political satire. That is an attributed legal assessment, not a court decision on Díez’s complaint or an order allowing the video to remain online.

Íñigo Navarro, a former law faculty dean at Madrid’s Comillas Pontifical University, told El País that the context made clear the people depicted had not said those things. Díez’s request, by contrast, asks for a concrete intervention: taking the campaign advert down.