Cartoon By: Aaron Paul C. Caril
EDITORIAL
Can COMELEC regulate AI, social media, and internet technology effectively in the 2025 elections?
Alan Turing, a young British polymath, once posited the theory that, like humans, machines can use available information and reason to solve problems and make decisions.
Turing, however, could not produce a proof of concept and advocacy from high-profile people because computers lacked an essential prerequisite for intelligence: they couldn’t store commands, only execute them. In other words, computers could be told what to do but couldn’t remember what they did.
Despite the setbacks, Turing, together with John Von Neumann, founded the technology that is behind artificial intelligence (AI): they made the transition from computers to 19th-century decimal logic (which thus dealt with values from 0 to 9) and machines to binary logic (which rely on Boolean algebra, dealing with more or less essential chains of 0 or 1) formalized the architecture of our contemporary computers and demonstrated that it was a universal machine, capable of executing what is programmed. Fast forward to the present time, artificial intelligence has advanced by leaps and bounds, sneaking into our daily lives and influencing human behavior.
While the use of AI has impacted our lives positively, there is a global concern about the negative impact of its misuse. One of the areas of concern raised by the United Nations on the risks of AI misuse is its capability to spread disinformation and hate speech—undermining truth, facts, and safety, adding a new dimension to the manipulation of human behavior, and contributing to polarization and instability on a vast scale.
COMELEC recently passed Resolution No. 11064, which regulates the use of social media, artificial intelligence, and internet technology for digital election campaigns in relation to the 2025 National and Local Elections and the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
All official social media accounts and pages, websites, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, and other online and internet-based campaign platforms of candidates and parties intending to participate in the 2025 national and local elections and parliamentaryel ections and their respective campaign teams and those created, or managed by any person or entity, other than the candidates or parties themselves, that are primarily designed or primarily used to promote the election or defeat of a particular candidate or candidates, shall be duly registered with the EID.
Resolution No. 11064’s intention is good, but the question is whether COMELEC and other government agencies can regulate the use of artificial intelligence during election campaigns.
No less than UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres admitted that there is a huge skills gap around AI in governments and other administrative and security structures that must be addressed at the national and global levels.
While we are amazed by AI’s potential uses in almost all aspects of human activity, we are seeing only the best AI intended for public consumption right now. What is deeply concerning is the AI capability that can be clandestinely accessed only by those who have money to secure a seat of power.