Can you use AI without being used by it?

I ended my senior high school class in Media and Information Literacy this week with this question: Can you use new media, including artificial intelligence, without being used by them?

Our last class activity looked like a lesson about artificial intelligence. I gave each group of students the same prompt and assigned them a different AI tool. They were asked to copy and evaluate the answer. The point was not simply to use AI, but to learn how to read and analyze AI. They had to evaluate whether the fluent, balanced, and confident paragraph expected from AI was actually deep, complete, and grounded, or merely safe, smooth, and generic.

By the end, my students could see what media and information literacy is all about in the age of AI. It is no longer only about catching fake news or mastering the latest app or AI model. It is about human judgment: how we find, weigh, and share information without surrendering our mental faculties to whoever or whatever happens to speak, with AI’s help, in the most confident or eloquent voice.

And then, as if to give my class a final concrete lesson, the Senate of the Philippines obliged.

This week, Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano refused to recognize the new 12-member majority that declared all positions vacant and reorganized the chamber. Cayetano argued that the Constitution required 13 votes to unseat him, and called the move an illegal coup. His bloc then held its own so-called Blue Ribbon committee hearing on the flood-control scandal in the Senate session hall. The hearing presented 18 men, introduced months ago as former marines, who claimed they served as the “bagmen” of former congressman Zaldy Co, delivering billions of pesos in kickbacks that, they alleged, reached the highest levels of government.

The witnesses had already lost credibility months ago in the eyes of those who still care about evidence, or at the very least, fair play. The public was fed the spectacle of bribery allegations unsupported, so far, by documents. I can still hear my former editor saying in jest: “That is to his own according.” A media-literate audience could have paused, taken stock, and tested those incredible claims.

This is exactly one of the essential points our class discussed and studied this semester. Partisan discourse related to the Senate saga may carry the form of authority, confidence, or eloquence, but form is not substance. Facebook Live sessions and vlogs may project the aura of authenticity or spontaneity, while rhetorical flourish may make a public official sound credible (or irritating, depending on which side you are on). A hearing can look official while its very authority is in dispute. But fluency and theatrics are not truth.

After a semester of media and information literacy lessons, I would expect, and be proud, if my students could say this: the Senate saga, like much of today’s political drama, was staged for the feed --for the livestream, the clip, and the outrage that always travels faster than verification. Whoever owns the spectacle owns the story long before a single claim is checked.

Notice how certain everyone sounds these days, especially those who are fanatical or hopelessly captured by disinformation? It becomes more dangerous when a claim starts looping inside a closed group, when a baseless story hardens into gospel within the DDS bubble, shared and amplified until commentary feeds only on commentary, not facts. In AI, we call this “model collapse”: feed a system its own output long enough and it drifts from reality.

This is the information ecosystem our youth are facing. In such a world, the scarce resource is no longer information. It is judgment. The real question is not whether you can use media and AI. It is whether you can use both without being used by either.

So I wrapped up the semester with the following questions: When the environment rewards noise and virality, will you still choose to be careful? When everyone is busy turning a nation’s pain into social media content, will you still ask – Who is saying this? On what basis? Where is the evidence? What is missing? – before you believe, and before you share?

AI can produce fluent answers. Philippine politics can produce spectacle. Algorithms can make something trend. But only a thinking human being can produce wisdom. That, in the end, is what media and information literacy is for.