A Very Agreeable Enemy

My enemies are much better company when I supply their dialogue.

They get to the point. They remember exactly what they did. None of them wastes twenty minutes explaining that I have misunderstood his intentions. Sometimes one will apologize before I have finished telling him why he ought to. An efficient bastard. If only I had met this version first.

I am talking about the arguments I invent in my head, not conversations anyone has actually had. Here is a supervisor I can make up for the purpose. He kept me late, took the credit, and called the arrangement teamwork. Now he says, “I knew you needed the money. I thought you would put up with it.”

At last. We can begin.

Except we cannot begin. He has already delivered the thing I wanted to extract. I have prepared a magnificent reply to an excuse he no longer intends to offer. There I stand with my best sentence and nowhere to put it.

Spain’s People’s party has found a public use for this private talent. In the Guardian on October 23, Ashifa Kassam reports on an AI-generated campaign video in which likenesses of people linked to Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party appear to admit wrongdoing. The conservative opposition published it on its own social accounts. A synthetic Begoña Gómez, Sánchez’s wife, speaks about getting a university post thanks to her husband’s position. A synthetic José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero speaks about hiding jewellery. The real Gómez and Zapatero deny wrongdoing in the investigations to which those lines refer.

These aren’t inspected confessions. They are the opposition’s lines delivered by manufactured versions of the people accused.

The Guardian describes a small, nearly transparent notice identifying the video as AI-generated. The PP’s Borja Sémper says the aim wasn’t to make viewers think these were the real people speaking; it was to expose Socialist hypocrisy. Most of the nine legal experts consulted by El País considered the video protected political satire. In the October 23 copy I read, archived that morning, lawyer Íñigo Navarro argues that nobody would think these people had really said such things about themselves. Another specialist disputes whether the faint disclosure is sufficient. Those are legal opinions, not a court’s verdict.

I haven’t independently watched the campaign video. I am interested in the choice described by both reports: give the accusation to the accused to perform. Let the defence have its strongest version for a moment. Suppose every viewer recognizes the joke immediately. No confused pensioner. No gullible uncle. No one secretly taking a campaign sketch for courtroom evidence.

The pleasure still works. That is the part I recognize.

An opponent who denies everything leaves me with a job. I must answer him. An opponent who confesses in precisely my terms lets me enjoy having been right without enduring his account of the matter. I don’t merely get the last word. I get the words he would have said before it.

A cartoonist can do this. A mimic can do it. I have done it without a pencil, standing under running water while a man who is nowhere nearby makes a series of damaging admissions. AI didn’t invent the fantasy. It offers a way to put a recognizable version of the absent person into the finished performance. The political party can produce the accusation, the answer, and the satisfying agreement between them.

Return to my invented supervisor. I want more than a confession now. I want him to know what it cost me to remain after the others went home. So I give him another line.

“I didn’t think about your time.”

Too clean. It sounds like a man finishing a course. I make him worse.

“I didn’t care.”

There. Excellent. A face I dislike, saying the ugliest thing I believe about it. I can almost feel the satisfaction. But there is still a vacancy where his answer ought to be. I haven’t heard from the man. I have heard my complaint twice, with a change of speaker.

Perhaps I could put a little resistance in him. Not so much that I lose. Just enough to earn the victory. He could misunderstand something, make a poor joke, try to change the subject. I could even let him catch me exaggerating, provided I recovered beautifully in the next exchange.

This is a considerable amount of work to avoid one conversation.

I don’t know what the Spanish video will do to a single vote. The reports don’t settle that. Nor do I know whether these particular allegations will be established. A campaign’s ability to make someone appear to confess settles neither question. What I can follow is the appetite for an enemy who finally says what I have always known he meant.

I could stay with that enemy all evening. He would be punctual, vicious, stupid in exactly the right places. He would never bring up the occasion I had left out.

The real nuisance would arrive late, get the story wrong in his own favour, and object to a word I hadn’t noticed using. I might spend the rest of the evening defending that word instead of delivering my speech.

I have the speech ready.

Apparently we are going to argue about always.

Additional reporting: El vídeo del PP contra el PSOE agita el debate sobre los límites de la IA en la batalla política (October 23, 2026; inspected copy archived October 23, 2026, 06:50:37 UTC).

Source: Opposition deepfake video sparks outrage in Spain ahead of election