Coachella’s data-center ban takes effect September 25. Not a pause or a study—a prohibition, written into the city’s code after months of public scrutiny.
Palm Springs adopted a 45-day pause on the same day Coachella took its final vote. Indio and Desert Hot Springs approved moratoriums of their own.
Four cities in one summer. None waited for Sacramento or Washington to tell them what to do.
I don’t think most people here know that happened.
It matters because the question everyone keeps asking—should AI be regulated?—is already being answered. Rules are moving through statehouses most of us never read about.
The question is who’s holding the pen.
Rules can protect the industry, too
On September 16, California’s governor signed a law requiring disclosures in advertising that uses AI-generated performers. Two days later, NPR published an investigation into who was writing chatbot bills around the country.
Before borrowing its findings, I want to acknowledge what that investigation is about.
It centers on Cynthia Montoya, whose daughter Juliana began talking to chatbots at thirteen and died by suicide within a year. NPR reported at least 75 pending lawsuits against AI developers over harms to children.
Those deaths are why the bills exist. The investigation asks who is shaping the response.
Hawaii, Iowa, Oregon and Washington introduced bills largely modeled on a 2025 California law that consumer advocates had already called industry-friendly. Lawmakers, lawyers and safety advocates told NPR that bills in at least ten states carried similar language.
Look at the exemptions. A carve-out for a feature inside another app appeared in bills in at least eight states. An exemption for something functioning as a voice assistant appeared in five; it would cover Alexa.
NPR found that the most popular chatbots could fall outside some of the rules ostensibly written to govern them.
That isn’t an argument against rules. It’s a warning about what happens when only one side shows up.
Four councils showed up
Our valley’s councils held meetings, took public comment and voted.
That is the mechanism. Any city can use it.
When a TV crew asked me on September 21 what guardrails should look like, I said transparency. I want to know when AI is put in front of me, whether it’s video, images or something else.
I still think that. It’s also the easy half.
There’s another question that didn’t come up on camera. It worries me more than deepfakes do: can these systems find and understand the businesses here?
Before I get to the numbers, you should know whose work they are.
I have a business on the other side of this
The surveys below were published on aicoachellavalley.com, a product of my company, SunshineFM LLC. This newsroom is the nonprofit side.
AICV also sells Get Agent Ready, a paid program working on these same gaps. Our report says it “operates at exactly the dimensions this audit measures.”
The numbers are still the numbers. Weigh them knowing I have a business on the other side of them.
Being incomplete isn’t the same as being blocked
People run two problems together. I did it myself in an earlier draft.
The first is readiness.
We checked 3,627 listings across the valley’s visitor economy against eight basic things software looks for. Does the website work? Do listings agree? Is there schema markup—the structured information that helps software understand a page?
Fifty-eight met seven or eight of those checks. That’s 1.6 percent.
It doesn’t mean everyone else is unreadable. In the same report, 73 percent had a website that loaded cleanly and worked on a phone. The finding is that very few had completed the plumbing that makes a business easy for software to understand.
The second problem is a closed door.
We identified 224 hotels and venues and tested the 148 whose sites we could reach. Nearly a third—31.1 percent—turned an AI agent away.
Not incomplete. Blocked.
Those barriers clustered around big chains and flagship resorts, exactly where a visitor with money to spend might look first.
And the picture keeps changing. We later checked 536 business records again, most of them restaurants rather than hotels. Of the 490 we could compare against an earlier reading, about one in nine had changed.
A label won’t get your restaurant found
Labeling AI-generated content helps you know what you’re looking at.
It doesn’t answer whether your restaurant appears when a visitor asks an assistant where to eat tonight.
Nobody voted on that. Defaults, companies and whoever writes the list can decide it without a public meeting.
That is why I don’t want our conversation to stop at labels, or at whether AI is good or bad. I want us to ask where decisions are being made and who from here gets to take part.
Patrick Jacobs, an assistant professor of computer information systems at College of the Desert, told News Channel 3 that the point of going to the gym is stronger muscles, not lifted weights.
Best line in the piece. It’s true well beyond the classroom.
The point of a rule isn’t having a rule. It’s ending up stronger than you started.
Update, October 15: Shortened the headline and edited for readability with Sat’s approval. The argument, sources, archive links and disclosures are unchanged. This remains a View based on the September reporting, not a new check of local rules.
Four councils showed this summer that a city can read the reports, hear the public and write a rule itself.
The next decision is already coming. All this infrastructure is looking for somewhere to go.
Will anyone from here be in the room—or will we read about it afterward?