Bato’s ‘message’

Caught with his pants down, roly-poly Bato dela Rosa, or at least one of his closeted aides, excused his embarrassment by resorting to an old information theory aphorism.

Ridiculed no end last weekend for sharing an apparently AI-generated video featuring fake “interviews” of two students not supportive of the Veep’s impeachment, smug Dela Rosa doubled down by saying that regardless of whether the video was AI-generated or not, it was the message that mattered.

Besides ridicule, Dela Rosa also faced other trenchant takedowns. Many, including the Palace, took turns dissing him, stressing that no senior government official had any business posting fake videos.

Similarly, the Veep was also taken down when she came to the aid of Dela Rosa. Inexplicably, however, she ventured into strange territory, illogically coupling profiteering and the use of AI for propaganda.

There was, however, a certain sinister rhyme to both their innocent intentions, which could only be Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbel’s proverbial adage that lies propagandized a thousand times become the truth.

But before both Dela Rosa and the Veep could achieve such an end result, Facebook decided to take down the offending video.

At any rate, all these takedowns and defenses hark back to Dela Rosa’s innocuous though somehow reasonable claim that the “message mattered more than the AI medium which conveyed it.”

But before browbeating us for that heresy, be assured that we don’t ascribe any sort of keen intelligence to Dela Rosa, whom many in political circles say that, while he is smart enough to see a point, it takes him a long time to get it.

Anyway, to make some sense out of Dela Rosa, his excuse is actually the reverse of the late Canadian information theorist Marshall McLuhan’s 1960s era aphoristic information maxim — “the medium is the message.”

In essence, McLuhan meant that the form of a message — whether print, visual or AI generated — determines the ways by which that message will be perceived. McLuhan argued that modern electronic communications have far-reaching consequences, to the point of actually altering the way in which we experience the world.

By echoing McLuhan, Dela Rosa meant in effect to argue that the use of artificial intelligence (AI–the medium) in getting messages across doesn’t at all matter.

But it does matter.

Well, at least to us who haven’t been sucked into the rabbit hole that is the Duterte alternative universe and who remain wary about AI messing up our heads.

Still, Dela Rosa’s argument somehow refers to a specific type of Filipino —those who still refuse to see that they’re suffering from Duterte Derangement Syndrome or DDS.

In fact, using sophisticated AI for anti-impeachment propaganda could only indicate that these pitiful political zombies are also capable of keeping up with the times when they see AI-generated images as some sort of virility symbols of their DDS.

But it’s also probable that they aren’t yet in the throes of rigor mortis as many Filipinos now prefer video over text when getting their facts or opinions.

They are, in fact, taking advantage of that significant turn in communications.

In its 2025 Digital News Report released last Monday, the Oxford Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 55 percent of Filipinos preferred watching news and opinions over computer-generated video. Only 31 percent preferred reading the same news and opinions in newspapers, while 14 percent preferred radio.