Podemos' AI-generated 'true left' poster backfires with anatomical blunders

Podemos and its 'true left' poster: hands without bodies and a plea not to disappear

A poster from Podemos, the Spanish left-wing party, proclaiming "the true left" has been enough to reopen the box of thunder. The image, generated with artificial intelligence according to the most technically minded observers, is riddled with glaring flaws: an arm growing out of a leg, a right hand attached to a left arm, bodies without limbs and limbs without bodies. The result, more than an electoral message, looks like a failed anatomy exam.

The issue has two layers. The first is aesthetic: the poster comes across as a jumble of silhouettes in which not a single recognisable worker appears, no trades, no wage earners. The second is political, and it weighs more. The text accompanying the image asks that "it be clear who the true left is in this country and that they not make it disappear". Read coldly, that plea sounds like an early farewell rather than the start of a campaign.

What the Podemos poster actually shows

The most common description is a collage of stacked identities: women in headscarves, racialised faces, a white-haired figure at one end. Nothing that evokes the factory, the fields, the office or the self-employed worker carrying their social security contributions. For a party that made capital-labour conflict its banner, the absence of working people in the poster is, at the very least, a textbook incoherence.

The technical detail has served as ammunition. Generative AI has a well-known problem with limbs, and here it showed off: arms sprouting where they should not, duplicated hands, a Black person's limb starting at the knee. Anyone who has tinkered with these models knows that fixing this takes two minutes. Publishing it as is suggests haste, carelessness, or both.

The plea to 'not disappear' and the tactical vote

The underlying message is the one generating the most ink. Asking the electorate to prevent a party's disappearance is a strange way to ask for votes: it shifts the burden onto the voter and turns the brand's survival into the central argument. The campaign looks set to be long, and the successive polls — some giving it one seat, others leaving the range at zero — will erode more than mobilise.

Some argue the poster targets a very specific audience: young urban voters, minority sensibilities, alliances with migrant collectives. Against that weighs the argument that this sum, without a material narrative, is not enough to sustain a parliamentary group. The left to the left of the PSOE (Spain's main socialist party) already competes in that space with other parties, and the room is narrowing.

From aesthetics to framing: why the poster stings

The poster has triggered an uncomfortable comparison. Several voices point out that the piece does exactly what the party accuses its adversaries of doing: imposing a narrative, manufacturing a representation of society that matches neither the demographics nor the priorities it claims to defend. The paradox, to say the least, is thought-provoking.

There is also the underlying suspicion: that the poster is not about Spain but about how things ought to be, an idealised picture where the working class has been replaced by a catalogue of identities. If the message lands, the electoral cost may be greater than the embarrassment of the floating hands. And if it does not land, it will remain a pre-campaign anecdote.

The finishing touch: the flag some identify in the composition is not red, but that of another country. With that material, the campaign has plenty to work with.