The Architecture of Control: Confusion, Distraction and Precision in the future of AI

If you are worried about AI taking your job, I can assure you, it already has. If you’re thinking to yourself, “there’s absolutely no way AI can do what I do”, perhaps you have a bit more time to kill.

Regardless of which camp you sit in, jobs are one of the last things you should be worried about right now. I’m sure you’re thinking yeah, it’s probably not jobs, it’s AI ethics – intellectual property, privacy, responsible AI. If you're creative, this must feel like the most pressing, unresolved and unsettling aspects of AI. How to protect what is uniquely yours. It was bad enough that AI indiscriminately scrubbed the entire internet, your material included, but it’s even more unsettling knowing that AI can convincingly mimic the work, sound and features of orators, writers, and artists with a handful of targeted prompts.

The feeling that anyone can mimic anyone else has the potential to strip us of all of our sense of uniqueness.  It’s not simply a random, enormous data lake the models have been trained on - it’s the hearts, minds, thoughts and experiences of millions of people. We’ve essentially data mined each other. We’re all up for grabs. Today, I can ask ChatGPT to prepare a 5-day meal plan, workout and make-up routine that mirrors Beyoncé’s. Suddenly, Beyoncé doesn’t feel so far out of reach.

But ethics, as awesome as it would be to live my life as Beyoncé, is still not the greatest threat. Bias? Accuracy? Deep Fakes? Hallucinations? Nope – still not it.

This leads me to the Big Beautiful Bill, also known as BBB, not to be mistaken with BBL as my mind so often translates it. Don’t you just love the associative mind? (Thank you Daniel Kahneman).  The Big Beautiful Bill is the Trojan Horse of the Internet age. Tucked alongside tax cuts, spending slashes and Medicaid restrictions is the future of AI as we know it.

The Big Beautiful Bill carves out $500,000,000 from the Treasury to ‘modernize and secure Federal information technology systems through the deployment of commercial artificial intelligence, the deployment of automation technologies, and the replacement of antiquated business systems..’. While the price tag is high, I think most would agree that this squarely fits into a spending bill. What seemingly does not look like the others is what comes next. 

Further down section 43201 is a moratorium stating that ‘no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce, during the 10-year period beginning on the day of the enactment of this Act, any law or regulation of that State or a political subdivision thereof limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems entered into interstate commerce.

For those of us not well versed in Act-making language, what this means is that for the next 10 years, the federal government assumes full control of AI policy, rules and regulation in the United States, blocking States from creating State-level laws to bring accountability, human protection and AI safety to its citizens – basically, no one can check AI, other than the federal government. You heard that right – 10 years. Think about how often you used ChatGPT, Midjourney, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, etc. exactly one year ago and compare that to how integrated it is to your life today – and often without your conscious consent. Now imagine where AI might be 10 years from now, almost exclusively regulated and controlled by the goals and priorities of the federal government and whomever is sitting in the Oval Office in 2035.  

The Big Beautiful Bill goes on to say that the federal government will welcome, with open arms, any State law or regulation that functions to accelerate AI development and strike down those that slow it down. I’m no politician, but the one thing I do know about States is that they do a pretty good job at keeping up with the real impacts of shifts in federal policy simply because of its proximity to the lives of its citizens. 

New York, California and Illinois have already started down this path and all currently have various laws or regulations in place to address things like AI bias, discrimination, protection for whistleblowers, harmful hiring practices or medical decisions that AI might influence. If the Big Beautiful Bill passes, you can say goodbye to all of those guardrails. What we’re left with will be an entity that contains the largest collective repository of information about all American citizens, with a blank canvas to make, shape, inform and influence the entire system of which AI operates.  Any information in possession of the federal government – think tax returns; medical information; employment history; labor, hospitalizations and disability records; student load data; passport, visa and travel information – is fair game for use to feed, train, and ultimately make decisions about access, eligibility and allocation.

Since this administration has already thrown out diversity, equity and inclusion, reverted everyone back neatly into two genders, renamed bodies of water, started on the path to defund public radio, uprooted the lives of immigrants, narrowed the influence of universities and restricted immigration from certain countries, I’m curious about how the outputs of AI systems might evolve under this particular agenda.

But, you’re probably thinking, the government doesn’t own AI systems. OpenAI, Meta, Google, etc. own AI systems & models, and they’re private companies. Yes, they are private companies. Private companies that are run by billionaires with billions of dollars wrapped up in government contracts. Who, by the way, also need to operate within the legal framework of the country’s copyright, employment, energy, trade, privacy and labor laws, laws set by the federal government. Take those copyright laws, for example. Copyright laws are determined by Congress, which is currently controlled by none other than the Grand Old Party – both the House and the Senate. 

So, while I’m sure some creatives are scrambling to protect, patent and copyright their work against AI models with the hopes of being afforded the opportunity to opt in or opt out of future iterations, it might be good to comprehend that the same rules may not apply.

Don’t take the bait. It’s not a coincidence that the timing of ICE’s ramp up coincides with the timing of the spending bill hitting the floors of Congress. They know most of us care about humanity and will focus on the thousands of hardworking people – who are not criminals and many with no criminal record – getting ripped from their families and put in handcuffs. They know that with the uncertainty that tariffs have created and the impacts it has had on our wallets, we’ll be focused on tax cuts and deductions. We’ll be looking at our communities and bank accounts more than we’ll be considering the consequences of unregulated AI. 

We are all distracted. Not with fake new media but with controlled news media - incentivized news media. 

Within the delirium and confusion of the topic-of-the-hour news, the President is precisely and quietly sneaking in a provision that will fundamentally change the world as we know it. There’s an African proverb that says “he who controls the well, controls the village.” AI is the well, and well, you can take a guess who will control it.

By Jessica Mensah 
This article is 100% human written 

Sources:
One Big Beautiful Bill Act, H.R. 1, 119th Cong. (2025). Retrieved from Congress.gov