Does Mrs Mínguez exist? Gabriel Albiac's AI blunder in El Debate

There is no evidence that Mrs Mínguez does not exist: she is a real person holding a position in Spain's PSOE. The confusion stems from a video that Gabriel Albiac took for an AI-generated fake but which turned out to be a genuine recording.

The anecdote is told by **Gabriel Albiac** himself in **El Debate**, and it is amusing because the joke backfires on the teller. Albiac watched a video of a blonde woman with long curls defending tenants facing eviction and lashing out at vulture funds. It seemed so perfect, so textbook, that he concluded it was a montage. A fake, he said. Something made with artificial intelligence. He sent it to a friend, and the friend corrected him: no, that woman exists, she has a name and a position in Sánchez's party.

## The video that seemed invented

The scene Albiac took for fake was a real appearance. In it, a Socialist spokesperson was talking about evictions and vulture funds, and a journalist asked her about a major housing landlord involved in the eviction of some tenants. That landlord, according to the story, owned around **thirty rental flats** and a couple of companies in **Panama**. And it turned out to be the spokesperson's own spouse.

The spokesperson's response was to raise her voice. She said that personal attacks were the worst thing in politics. That her company was a family business dedicated to renting and complied with the law. That the others were something else. And that the law works. All of it, according to the text, with a defiant gesture at the camera.

## Why Albiac suspected AI

Albiac's reasoning is simple: nothing real can be that perfect. A hairstyle like that does not exist. A spokesperson who calls her partner's competitors vulture funds while defending the family business cannot be real. Too neat. Too literary.

It is an understandable reaction in 2026. Artificial intelligence produces videos that are hard to tell apart from real ones, and the reflex of doubting what you see on screen has become almost automatic. The problem is when that reflex is applied to a specific person who does exist, with a name, a surname and a position. Doubt stops being scepticism and becomes something else.

## The name Albiac refused to believe

Albiac writes that he still has full certainty that the alleged Mrs Mínguez does not exist. He says it ironically, as someone who knows he got it wrong and owns up to it. But the sentence, taken out of context, asserts something false: that a PSOE spokesperson is a product of algorithms.

She is not. Mrs Mínguez is a real person. The video is real. What Albiac took for a lie factory was simply an awkward political scene he preferred not to believe. And that, at bottom, is what makes the story interesting: not that AI deceives, but that sometimes we prefer to believe that what unsettles us is a montage.

The anecdote serves a purpose beyond laughing at Albiac. It reminds us that doubting everything is not the same as thinking. And that calling fake whatever we dislike is a temptation that knows no ideology.