The Show for May 4, 2026: Diamond grinding for freeways, wolves on a plane and more

Some Valley freeways are getting a new treatment in an effort to reduce road noise. A look at how it works and why officials are bullish on its future. Plus, chartering a flight — for wolves.

Transcript

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m LAUREN GILGER.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, a whole lot of lawmakers are racking up unpaid campaign finance late fees.

LAUREN GILGER: And what AI-written college application essays may say about the state of writing education.

MARK BRODIE: But first, the Arizona Senate this week is expected to take up the House-approved budget plan. The governor’s office has called the plan reckless and unbalanced, although the governor herself has said there are some provisions in it that she supports. The House okayed the package of bills along party lines last week. With me now, as he is every Monday during the legislative session to talk about what to expect in the coming days at the state capitol, is Howie Fischer of Capitol Media Services. Good morning, Howie. Howie, are you with us?

HOWIE FISCHER: Oh, there we go.

MARK BRODIE: There we go. How you doing, Howie?

HOWIE FISCHER: You gotta teach us print people to press the little button that says "on." We are low — definitely low-tech here.

MARK BRODIE: All right. Well, speaking of pressing the buttons, it seems like the Legislature is trying to press some of the governor’s buttons here in terms of providing her with a budget that some of it she likes, some of it she doesn’t. The House, as I mentioned, approved it last week. Any reason to think the Senate won’t follow suit in along party lines this week?

HOWARD FISCHER: Oh, I don’t see any reason. I mean, we may get one senator who keeps talking about just going off the reservation, but the votes are lined up. There are 17 Republican senators. They could even lose one and still go through.

I think there’s also belief of even if there’s folks on the Republican side who don’t like everything that’s in there, they need to send a message to the governor that her $18.7 billion plan is just too large. There are too many things in there; there are too many proposed tax increases like on short-term rentals, on certain kinds of sports gaming operations, that just are not acceptable.

Now, then we go back to — we essentially have a situation here of two teenagers. "Well, I won’t call so-and-so, they should call me." And then you’ve got the speaker of the House saying, "No, the governor should call me." The governor saying, "No, he should call me." I don’t know where we go from here. Obviously, we have a June 30 deadline, and somebody at some point has to pick up the phone.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so Howie, I’m curious about the timing of all this because, traditionally, when the Legislature has a budget ... both chambers sort of work in tandem, and sometimes they work through the night. They pass it and they send it to the governor, even if, you know, in this case, the governor’s going to veto it. But that was not the way this happened. Is there anything to be read into the fact that the Senate waited several days to take up the House budget?

HOWARD FISCHER: No, I think they wanted to make sure that the votes were there. And as you know, because you’ve been out at the Capitol, what they try to do sometimes to expedite a bill is you will pass your own version and then sub out the other chamber’s version.

So I think what’s going to happen is the Senate is going to pass what is identical to what the House passed. It will go back to the House, which then can say, "OK, our version’s being identical to the Senate, we don’t need to go — put those through a hearing, and we’ll go ahead and get it to the governor," perhaps as early as tomorrow afternoon.

MARK BRODIE: So, there had been some speculation — maybe wishful thinking — that instead of just doing what you just outlined, that ... after the House passed the budget, there’d be some room for negotiation with the governor, and maybe they would come to some kind of agreement and then, you know, the bills would go back to the House for them to approve the changes made in the Senate to align with the governor. Seems like that’s not what’s going to happen.

HOWARD FISCHER: No. Again, they’re not even talking. I mean, the governor will say, "Well, we’re having staff-to-staff communications," but that’s just not the way it works. Everyone is sort of dug in at this point. You know, the governor’s saying, "You know, we need these revenues. We need these programs for the poor, we need the utility assistance programs." And the Republicans are saying, "We can’t afford that because of the fact that, A, we adopted a much bigger package of tax hikes. That’s the old HR1 issue of adding the business tax cuts to everything else that the governor also wants, you know, like the higher standard deduction."

But that the governor’s budget relies on what they believe is, you know, phony money. I mean, $760 million coming from the feds to reimburse us for border costs, which may or may not be coming but hasn’t been seen yet. I mean, you’ve got the — that tax on short-term rentals, never going to pass in a Republican Legislature. The higher fees on the gaming, never going to pass there. She said she built a budget based on $89 million in savings from capping enrollment in voucher programs based on parental income. Not going to happen in this Legislature.

So, by definition, there’s really no place to go until maybe she vetoes this budget, then they say, "OK, we now have two months to get something out. Now we have to figure out what we can each live with."

MARK BRODIE: Does it seem, Howie, among lawmakers that you talk to at the Capitol, that there’s an appetite for negotiation? Like, ... do they need to send her this to show that this is what they want to do, she vetoes it, and then, as we’ve seen in years past, then the real talk starts? Does it seem as though that’s where this is headed?

HOWARD FISCHER: I definitely believe so. I think that they have to show: "We’re together." And, you know, their message is, "Look, governor, you know, we wanted to actually sit down and talk about the HR 1 tax cuts last fall when we knew they were coming." And she didn’t want to do that. Then she puts out her budget with only some of the HR 1 tax cuts. They send her a full package, she vetoed them again.

And then, of course, the whole issue of she walked away from negotiation because she said: "You’re not negotiating in good faith." They felt the need to say, "We’re united." They felt the need to send a message to the governor saying, "We have the votes to pass out a budget."

Now, obviously it lacks the governor’s signature, but they need — this is sort of sending a message saying, "We can do this without you. We don’t need your ... various plans for raising taxes." And, "OK, now we recognize we need a signature on here. Let’s see if we can move forward before we send the state into a position of we’re trying to figure out what do we do on June 30?"

MARK BRODIE: Right. All right. That is Howie Fischer with Capitol Media Services. Howie, I suspect we’ll be talking about this topic again maybe next week, at least a few more times.

HOWARD FISCHER: Oh, please, please make it stop!

MARK BRODIE: [LAUGHS] Howie, thanks as always. Appreciate it.

HOWARD FISCHER: You’re welcome.

LAUREN GILGER: There are a host of state lawmakers who owe the state thousands of dollars in late fees for failing to file campaign finance reports on time. Three have late fees that have racked up into the six digits. But only one actually paid her fines in full this year. And now there’s a bill that would stop the fines based on old accounts, erasing late fees back to 2016. An amendment would cap the fees at $5,000. It all goes back to the 1990s, when lawmakers decided to crack down on campaign corruption, but the laws have never really been enforced. And here to tell us why is Ray Stern with The Arizona Republic. Good morning, Ray.

RAY STERN: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for coming in. OK, so how much do some of these lawmakers owe?

RAY STERN: Well, it was shocking to a couple to let them know that some of these are six-digit fines.

Sally Ann Gonzales, a senator who’s been a senator for, I think, eight terms over — yeah, she’s been there for a while. And so she’s got these old campaign account finance late fees of $663,000.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. That’s a lot of money.

RAY STERN: That’s a lot of money for someone that makes $24,000 a year as a legislator. And this is both a Republican and Democrat issue. Republican Walt Blackman, who’s from Snowflake, he owes about $300,000.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. In fines. OK, so they’re not the only ones. There are more than 20 others you’re reporting who owe smaller amounts, and it’s fines that have racked up against political parties, PACs, things like that as well.

RAY STERN: Right. I counted 25 current candidates — including incumbent office holders — who owe more than $1,000 in these late fees for not filing their campaign finance reports on time.

And the reason I held it to $1,000 is because there’s a law that says that basically you’re not supposed to ... run for office if you owe more than $1,000 of these late fees.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So tell us about this enforcement part of this. Like, how have they racked up these late fees and really most people still run?

RAY STERN: Right. There’s a couple of different ways that this happens. One is you didn’t pay your campaign finance reports — or you didn’t file your campaign finance reports on time, and it created a late fee.

Back in the ’90s, as you mentioned, they decided that there was a problem with candidates and office holders not turning in their campaign finance reports on time. These are really important documents. They show how much a politician is getting from donations and also how much they’re spending on their campaign and what they’re spending it on. So really, voters need to know who’s paying them and what they’re doing with their money.

And if you don’t ... file your campaign finance report on time, then nobody knows. Some of these reports are filed so late that the election happens and they still haven’t filed that report.

And so to curb that, in the ’90s they put these late fees on there. The late fees are very onerous. They’re supposed to sort of let you know that you need to file these reports. It’s $10 a day for the first 15 days and then $25 a day after that.

LAUREN GILGER: Oh, wow.

RAY STERN: Sally Ann Gonzales, if you look at one of her old campaign finance accounts where the big fees are, it’s just shocking to see that some of her reports are thousands of days late. She owes $75,000 for this one, $65,000 for this one, and it adds up to this huge money.

But they don’t enforce it.

LAUREN GILGER: They don’t enforce it, right. That’s the —

RAY STERN: They don’t really enforce it. They enforce it sometimes. And some candidates get scared about this, they pay their amounts.

Consuelo Hernandez is a representative from Tucson. She paid $24,000 this year, which is equivalent to her annual salary. Her sister, who is also a Tucson lawmaker, owes over $100,000 in these late fees but hasn’t paid any of them.

And that’s because, in effect, you don’t have to pay them unless there’s some kind of court order that said you had to pay them. Just the fact that they exist, even though they’re there to make you file your report on time, there’s, there’s just no teeth in the law.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, right. OK, so this is something that Secretary of State Adrian Fontes has tried to change just in the last couple of years, right, but didn’t successfully do this exactly?

RAY STERN: Exactly. Before Fontes came into office, there was waivers, essentially, that the savvy office holders could get. So if you really didn’t understand the system, you might end up paying $1,000 or $2,000 — which could be onerous unless you have a lot of money sitting around.

But if you know what to do, you’d go to the Secretary of State’s Office and ask for a waiver and they would waive that down. As I wrote three years ago ... former Rep. Cesar Chavez owed $60,000, and they made him pay $1,000 of that. This year, the Attorney General’s office, made Sen. Kiana Sears pay $250 out of $14,000 that she owed.

But the Secretary of State’s Office, Adrian Fontes, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes decided that he wouldn’t do waivers anymore when he got in office. So these amounts have just kind of ballooned up, and they’re looking very high.

And like I said, 25 lawmakers and other office holders owe more than $1,000, but nobody’s making them pay.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. OK, so that’s where the lawmakers come in again, and now they’re trying to basically change the law here, get rid of some of them?

RAY STERN: Right. Part of the problem is that some of these old campaign finance accounts that are still active are charging the lawmakers late fees even if they’ve filed the same reports in a different account. And some of these are not really legitimate, others are.

But what Rep. Jeff Weninger from Chandler wants to do is go back to 2016 and wipe out all of the late fees that are in these accounts that are essentially defunct at this point. So the candidate isn’t using them to report their donations and spending.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. And then there’s an amendment to that that would also cap late fees in the future, it sounds like?

RAY STERN: Right. It would cap them at $5,000. So you just wouldn’t see these large amounts, which are kind of a farce anyway if they’re not making them pay.

But Sen. Analise Ortiz, a Democrat, she had hoped to get an amendment in that would actually prevent people from running for office at all unless they pay their late fees. That is still not going into this law.

So there could be some shenanigans in the future where people are intentionally not filing their report and then getting away with it.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. So, I mean, last 50, 30 seconds here, Ray. What’s the endgame here? Like, how far has this proposal gotten? Does it sound like most of these lawmakers will end up having to pay these?

RAY STERN: I think that the lawmakers understand that they need to do something about this. It’s just the public can’t accept the fact that there’s, there are penalties that are not being enforced. So this law has a good chance of passing. It’s got bipartisan support. And it doesn’t do that much, which they like.

LAUREN GILGER: Which they like.

All right, we’ll leave it there. Ray Stern with the Arizona Republic joining us. Ray, thank you very much for coming in, thanks for your reporting here. Appreciate it very much.

RAY STERN: You bet, thanks.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. Coming up, a look inside the unregulated industry of family vloggers and child influencers.

MARK BRODIE: Metro Phoenix freeways will be getting a new treatment in an effort to increase their longevity and decrease road noise.

It’s called diamond grinding, and regional transportation officials have been testing it on a few spots across the Valley over the past few years. They decided in 2023 that it would be the new plan going forward regionwide.

There are around 100 miles of freeway that already have this. Arminta Syed says the goal is to eventually have it on every mile of freeway in Maricopa County.

Syed is transportation policy and initiatives manager for the Maricopa Association of Governments. She joined The Show to talk about the project.

ARMINTA SYED: Yes. Diamond grinding is actually a treatment that’s given to roadway surfaces. So you have a concrete layer and then diamond grinding is when you take a big machine that’s got these, what they call diamond blades, and it implements these thin grooves into the roadway surface that run in the same direction as the tires. And so that’s all diamond grinding really is.

MARK BRODIE: So you’re taking something and going over the existing surface as opposed to putting a new surface on the roadway?

ARMINTA SYED: That’s exactly correct. That’s exactly correct.

MARK BRODIE: And what does that do? What are the benefits of doing that?

ARMINTA SYED: A few different things. So, one of the biggest things, of course, is that it helps alleviate a lot of traffic noise. So, a little bit of background, traffic noise, the way it work — what really drives it is that interaction between car tires when they hit the pavement.

And so what diamond grinding does, those thin grooves, is it takes those sound waves that are created at the tire-pavement interface and it basically kind of absorbs them so it doesn’t travel out and people can hear it.

Sky Schaudt
Portions of State Route 51 are undergoing diamond grinding, which involves using blades to remove about a quarter-inch of roadway surface, in spring 2026.

MARK BRODIE: Is that assuming that the tires are in those grooves?

ARMINTA SYED: It is not, but it is assuming that basically as the sound waves travel out, they get captured by those thin grooves. Yes.

MARK BRODIE: OK. And what are some of the other benefits of doing that?

ARMINTA SYED: Sure, in addition, you always have to make sure that, you know, safety, friction, rideability, all of that is always taken into account. So it really helps maintain that. It provides great friction even under, you know, monsoon rainy conditions. It provides a smooth ride. And in addition, also continues to help lower that traffic noise.

MARK BRODIE: One of the things that’s so interesting about this is that when rubberized asphalt began to be used on the freeways, one of the big benefits was that it’s so much quieter than everything else. It’s interesting that now the conventional wisdom seems to be that this diamond grinding is maybe even more quiet and has other benefits over something like rubberized asphalt.

ARMINTA SYED: Yeah, it’s, it’s fascinating because — so to go back to even before rubberized asphalt overlay was on all of our freeways, what happened was in the late '90s, early 2000s, that’s when much of today’s freeways that you see here in our region came online.

They were open to traffic and at the same time, we were seeing a ton of population growth, kind of like we have been for the past few years. So all of a sudden you had all these new roads and a ... substantial increase in the amount of cars, and there was a noise crisis everywhere.

And so what happened was, at the time, ADOT, Arizona Department of Transportation, was constructing these freeways. They were concrete-based freeways and all of these major noise concerns were traveling up to the governor at the time. And so the governor, in response, said, "OK, I mandate that all of our freeways will just be covered with this layer of rubberized asphalt overlay."

And there was dedicated funding set aside for that overlay to be originally installed. But what there wasn’t was funding set aside to maintain that overlay or dedicated funding set aside for replacing that overlay when it got into a bad enough state that you needed to replace it.

Rubberized asphalt overlay was really, really great when it was originally installed and that’s still — that’s still correct today. But it very, very quickly starts to deteriorate. And because there wasn’t dedicated funding set aside for it, what you had was all across our region, you had that original overlay in failing conditions.

So what you have with diamond grinding is something that produces a lot of the similar benefits that rubberized asphalt did, but it’s also more durable than rubberized asphalt. And that is really where you have the benefits of diamond grinding way outshine the benefits of rubberized asphalt. There’s a lot less maintenance involved, it lasts a lot longer, it’s a lot cheaper. So from that perspective, it is worlds above rubberized asphalt.

MARK BRODIE: So let me ask you about the cost of this. How does it compare? And you mentioned that it’s more durable. Is it the kind of thing that you do it once and then ... does it last forever? Do we know?

ARMINTA SYED: Yeah, so diamond grinding is new to our region, so we’ll find out. But our elected officials who made this decision, they very much specified that when we’re doing this analysis, looking at how does diamond grinding compare against rubberized asphalt overlay, you need to do that comparison analysis over what they call the life cycle.

And what we found was, just looking at our peers, other states, what they’re doing, diamond grinding will at minimum last 20, 25 years if not 30. Rubberized asphalt, on average, would last about 10 years before you have to fully replace it. And even way before that, it starts to have those failing conditions, those potholes, those grooves, etc.

MARK BRODIE: So there are other places that are already using this, yeah?

ARMINTA SYED: Yeah. We’re actually very unique in our region in that we had a brand new concrete pavement and then we put brand new rubberized asphalt overlay on top of it. Most places that have that concrete pavement will do a similar type of treatment as diamond grinding where they’re installing grooves to help with rideability and noise.

MARK BRODIE: If you are on a freeway — I’m not advocating anybody walk around the freeway ... can you see grooves in the roadway ... where it’s been done?

ARMINTA SYED: Yeah, you can. And, you know, obviously depends on how much sunlight you’re seeing and that reflection, but you can. You can see absolutely those grooves.

MARK BRODIE: OK. Would this be suitable for surface streets also?

ARMINTA SYED: Yeah, it would be. I would say it depends a little bit on, again, if they have that concrete base already. So that was a key factor in all of our analysis. If we didn’t have such good, thick concrete-based freeway pavements, diamond grinding wouldn’t have been such a good option for us.

So, No. 1, it depends a little bit on that because ... if you have to add a lot more concrete, the more expensive everything’s going to get. And then it also depends, I think, on the amount of traffic that roadway gets. It is where there’s a lot of traffic, a lot of constant traffic, that’s really where it performs the best.

LAUREN GILGER: Last month, Mexican gray wolves hit another important milestone in the effort to reintroduce them in the wild across the Southwest when eight of them boarded a private jet and flew to Durango, Mexico, to be released into the wild, as The Arizona Republic reports. And conservationists are celebrating. They say this release of two wolf families into the southernmost reaches of their territory is an important step in ensuring the wild population of wolves has the genetic diversity to survive into the future. I spoke more about it with Greta Anderson, deputy director of the Western Watersheds Project.

GRETA ANDERSON: Well, this is really cool because the state of Durango, Mexico, was the last place that lobos were in the wild before the last few wolves were captured and brought to the United States to start the captive breeding project. All of the wolves alive today are descended from the seven wolves that were left alive in the 1970s. So this was a species that came really close to going extinct.

Now repatriating them to Durango is like putting a big important piece back in the puzzle. It’s where they last were and it’s like, it’s a historic moment to have them back on the landscape there.

LAUREN GILGER: So a big moment in this. And an important one in terms of the scope of this program. Like, this has been 50 years in the making, right?

But I wonder if you’re looking at the long-term goals here, like it seems like we’re getting pretty close when it comes to the reintroduction of Mexican gray wolves.

GRETA ANDERSON: Well, we’re getting close if you look at the numbers, but if you look at the genetics of the species, there’s still a long way to go. And in fact, the recovery plan for Mexican gray wolves, in order to delist them, there has to be two stable populations in both the United States and Mexico. And Mexico’s wild population has been nowhere near stable.

So this new translocation that happened last month is really exciting, it’s a big leap forward, but it’s nowhere near self-sustaining, genetically diverse population in the wild such that management could be removed. And that’s true for the United States population as well.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so not there yet even though we’ve hit many milestones along the way and just seem to have hit another.

Tell us about some of the particular wolves that were just released in Mexico, because we know them, we know a lot about them, you in particular know a lot about them, right?

GRETA ANDERSON: Yeah. There were two wolf families that were released in Durango and one of the wolf families was from captivity. And then the other family, this is such a cool story because the matriarch of that family, her name is, she’s been named Yahve. And she originally was born in the United States, she was removed and sent down to Mexico, paired up with another wolf whose name was Remus. They ran through the state of Chihuahua and crossed the border back into New Mexico, where they set up shop in kind of the boot heel area of New Mexico. He unfortunately was killed and she was pulled back into captivity so that they could pair her with this other wolf, whose name is Wander. And the two of them were rereleased back into the Peloncillos of Arizona.

But then last summer, there was some conflict with livestock in Cochise County, the ranchers demanded her removal, and so Arizona Game and Fish Department went and got the whole family out of the wild again and they’ve been sitting in captivity. And so that’s Yahve and Wander, the female and the male, and then their two puppies.

Yahve is 7. She’s been handled multiple times, she’s been in and out of captivity, she’s had multiple different mates and this is like so exciting that she’s going to be able to just live out her life in the wild the way she deserves to as, as a wolf.

LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you about that because you mentioned, you know, the reason that they’ve been in captivity is because of some interaction with livestock. This is sort of a perpetual controversy when it comes to this Mexican gray wolf reintroduction program over the years because there are many who argue that these wolves are predators, they interfere with livestock, they kill cattle ranchers' cows, which is a problem obviously for them and for industry.

There is now an effort in the state Legislature that is making its way through that would bar Game and Fish from transporting puppies into Arizona as part of this reintroduction program. Rep. Paul Gosar has attempted to take the wolves off the endangered species list. Do you think there’s a balance to be struck there?

GRETA ANDERSON: I don’t, because the Endangered Species Act requires that management decisions are based on the best available science. And both the legislation that you referenced at the Arizona House and at the national level, neither of those are science-based decisions. Neither of those are looking at the numbers, at the genetics and saying, "OK, wolves are doing great, we can, you know, ratchet back their protection."

What they’re doing is saying, "We’re more worried about the livestock industry than we are about endangered species, so let’s just remove their protections now."

LAUREN GILGER: So let me ask you lastly, Greta, about the big picture here. You mentioned that, you know, we’re not there yet in terms of management being removed from this population and it has to do largely, it sounds like, with the genetic pool and trying to make sure that the species can survive into the long term even with this kind of limited genetic pool that it began with in the '70s, even though the numbers are up.

GRETA ANDERSON: There is still greater genetic diversity in the captive population than there is in the wild population. All of the wolves in zoos and facilities around the country, those wolves are more diverse than the wolves in the wild.

So in order to address the genetic crisis that Mexican gray wolves are really facing, we need to see more releases and quick. Because the larger the population gets, the harder it is to change the level of inbreeding in a beneficial way. So it’s really important that we start seeing whole families be released, just like happened in Mexico. They put out two whole families, well-bonded pairs with their puppies. We want to start seeing that in the United States so that we get some of that biodiversity from the captive population into the wild as quickly as possible.

LAUREN GILGER: And the clock is kind of ticking here, right?

GRETA ANDERSON: Absolutely, the clock is ticking. In part because we’re concerned that the longer we wait, the larger the population in the wild will be, the harder it will be for every new diversifying wolf, like a wolf brought in from captivity with diverse genes, their influence is going to be less spread across a greater number of wild wolves.

So we need to take advantage of the fact that the population is still relatively small from a total population standpoint and start getting that remaining diversity back into the wild.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. That is Greta Anderson, deputy director of the Western Watersheds Project, joining us to talk about another milestone for the Mexican gray wolf. Greta, thank you so much for coming on the show, I appreciate it.

GRETA ANDERSON: My pleasure, thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie.

An essay this spring on Slate came with a provocative headline: "I Humanize Chatbot-Written College Application Essays for a Living. I Have a Warning for Everyone."

In the piece, the author talks about how applicants hire her to take the essays they’ve used AI to write, and make them sound more like a human composed them.

Jessica Early is a professor of English education at Arizona State University and said she holds nothing against the author, but found the piece pretty sad as a statement on where we are, in terms of thinking about writing — and that students feel like they need to outsource their own stories and writing in this competitive world.

The Show spoke with her earlier and asked if she sees a difference between a college applicant asking a human to write an essay for them, and having AI write the essay and then having a human editor go through it to make it seem more authentic.

JESSICA EARLY: I think there is a difference. I think the goal of the college admissions essay — and there’s different kinds of genres like this that are high stakes — is to show who you are in connection to this college or university that you want to attend. And the university doesn't want to read a formula, whether it's written by you or whether it's written by a chatbot.

And the ultimate goal in the best-case scenario is that students are writing their stories and they're telling who they are, and they've honed their voices and craft as writers so that they feel confident doing so, and that they share their essays with trusted readers — whether they're editors or, you know.

MARK BRODIE: Maybe their parents.

JESSICA EARLY: Aunts or uncles — and they get helpful feedback. But I think if you're creating something in AI to tell your story, it's not going to be good writing and it's not going to be a solid admissions essay. And then if you're further removing yourself from the story by hiring an editor to read something that you haven't written, then you're getting further and further away from your own voice and story.

MARK BRODIE: Well, it's interesting you talk about finding your voice and, you know, you've been writing for a long time, I've been writing for a long time. I've been trying to think back to when I was, you know, 16, 17, 18, writing these kinds of essays to get into college. I'm pretty sure that I had not honed the voice that I have now or really even anything near it.

And you mention, you know, high-stakes situations before. This is a pretty high-stakes situation for a lot of students. I wonder if it’s maybe not surprising that students who are, you know, maybe not confident in their voice or haven't quite figured out what their writing voice is, when they’re needing to use it for such a high-stakes thing, that they're turning to another outlet?

JESSICA EARLY: I don't think it's a surprise at all. And I think it's actually a sad example of how we are not preparing students in the ways that we should be to teach writing or to write in the world. And that schools have sort of systematically taken out the opportunities for students to use their voice. Nowhere in the world should an 18-year-old or 17-year-old writer feel fully formed as a writer or completely confident and colleges don't expect them to have these unbelievably crafted, perfect, smooth-voiced texts.

But they want the text to be authentic to who they are at that age. And very much what we're finding in the research in schools across the country is that the only kinds of writing that students are doing — with some exceptions, of course, great teachers — is that students are more and more being asked to write formulaic kinds of writing that remove their voice completely.

So they have to write five paragraphs and literary analysis and kinds of writing that are scripted, and they don't get to hone that voice; they don't get to share their own stories.

MARK BRODIE: Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that students in many cases — again, not all, but in at least some cases — are being taught to write like AI? Just listening to the way you described, you know, the five-paragraph essay kind of formulaic sounds kind of like AI.

JESSICA EARLY: 100%. And for years and years now, we've continued to teach students that writing is the five-paragraph essay or it's a formula or it's something we can break down into sentences — do this, thesis paragraph and then these three supporting statements.

And don't get me wrong, there are strategies that are really helpful in learning to teach writing particularly in the beginning, but we write in the world across all different genres for different purposes, for different audiences and we need to give students the opportunity to do that.

We also need to give them opportunities to share the lived experience they have and the voices they come with and the languages they know. And if we remove the ability to practice and to do that and to experience the joy of writing, then of course we're going to turn to AI. And the thing that AI does really well is sort of the basic kinds of writing.

MARK BRODIE: Do you think the toothpaste can go back in the tube on this one? I mean, do you think we’re past the point of no return on not just college applicants but just, you know, students in general using AI in ways that maybe they shouldn't be?

JESSICA EARLY: No, I actually think AI isn't bad to use. I use it all the time as a tool. If I used it for my actual writing, my writing would be terrible and it wouldn't get published.

But I'm also, you know, but I'm also asked to do things in my work — publish articles, write memos, write emails, write grants — that are really sophisticated kinds of writing that require my expertise that I've honed over years. And for students in order to get there, we need to give them opportunities and give them topics not that we care about but that they care about and that they’re invested in. The more students have agency and interest in what they're writing, the more they can hone their voice.

So I really — my call is to sort of expand the way we think about the teaching of writing in schools to help prepare students to think of and use AI as a tool but in smart ways rather than replacing their own ideas and their voice.

MARK BRODIE: Is that a level of nuance that can be difficult for at least some students to grasp in terms of using AI, as you say, as a tool, but not using it to write your paper?

JESSICA EARLY: It is a level of nuance, but it's something we can show students how to do. And I do this in my classrooms, and a lot of wonderful teachers are doing this in so many amazing ways.

It's like having students use AI and then thinking through, like, what is it offering as an idea that can get me started and that I can run with? Or how are the things that AI kind of pops up in my brain actually limiting my thinking as a writer? And when is AI actually wrong, 'cause it's wrong a lot of times and limiting. But I think we have to have students practice this, and we need to, as teachers and writers, practice this as well.

MARK BRODIE: Is there something to be said here for making it so that students don't see writing as a chore or something they don't want to do but sort of encouraging an interest in writing and a love of writing and the ability to have an outlet to tell your story? And maybe if students are more interested in doing that, they're less likely to turn to technology to do it for them.

JESSICA EARLY: 100%. So when students are asked to write for real audiences, real purposes or genres that allow them to tell their lived experience and they feel invested and they care about the topic, they want to write. And these can be highly sophisticated research genres.

Then students come alive and writers come alive. And I think that's something we need to do more of in the classroom and in preparation for students to succeed in the workplace and in civic life and the university.

MARK BRODIE: All right, we'll have to leave it there. That is Jessica Early, a professor of English education at ASU. Jessica, good as always to talk to you. Thank you.

JESSICA EARLY: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: Mark, obviously you’ve heard of the Kardashians ?

MARK BRODIE: I’ve heard of them. I cannot say I keep up with them all that much though.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, but have you ever heard of the Loud family?

MARK BRODIE: I have not, no.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so I hadn’t either, but the Loud family— Pat and Bill Loud and their five kids — lived in Santa Barbara, California. And in 1972, they became the first reality TV family in a 12-hour series called "An American Family."

Here’s producer Craig Gilbert introducing the novel series before its first episode aired:

CRAIG GILBERT: For seven months, from May 30, 1971, to Jan. 1, 1972, the family was filmed as they went about their daily routine. There is no question that the presence of our camera crews and their equipment had an effect on the Louds, one which is impossible to evaluate. The Louds are neither average nor typical. No family is. They are not the American family; they are simply an American family.

LAUREN GILGER: It was that first reality TV family that spawned the Duggars, the Kardashians, the Gosselins and more according to our next guest. Because we all realized: We are fascinated by watching how other families live.

Fortesa Latifi is a journalist and author of the new book "Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online." In it, she looks at the rise of the child influencer industry whose parents are often the ones behind the camera and what’s it like to have your childhood moments sold to millions on Instagram as “content.”

Latifi went straight to the kids who were there in the book and dives into the lack of regulation around child influencers in the U.S.

Here in Arizona, House Bill 2192 would require family vloggers and content creators to set aside money for their kids the stars of the show, so to speak, who otherwise have no rights when it comes to the content they create.

I spoke with Latifi more about it all and just how big this industry has become.

FORTESA LATIFI: I mean, it’s huge. It’s part of the multi-billion-dollar influencing industry and, I mean, there are thousands of families who I would think of as kind of the top strata, and there are thousands more who are trying to get up there.

LAUREN GILGER: So give us an example of what this looks like. If someone’s not on Instagram or on social media and doesn’t know what this looks like, it almost seems innocuous at first. It’ll start out with, you know, a birth announcement, or sometimes even before a birth announcement, right?

FORTESA LATIFI: Yeah, it’s really interesting. A good amount of influencer kids start their social media presence when they’re in utero. So their parents will start posting for them from the womb and they’ll rack up hundreds of thousands of followers that way. And then, you know, when the child is born, the opportunity for content just explodes and the algorithm really loves babies, and it really loves pregnant moms.

LAUREN GILGER: So they — I don’t want to say like people innocently stumbled upon this — but it seems as if it’s developed from almost an accidental place, where people just sort of realized, you know, I could start selling this thing that my kid’s wearing or getting this for free and then that kind of evolved?

FORTESA LATIFI: Yeah, I think it depends on the person, but oftentimes they’ll have just posted something and it’ll have gone accidentally viral because the internet just, you know, the algorithm, we don’t know its ways and sometimes it’ll push things.

And then people will say, OK, let me take a crack at this because they see the immense possibility for financial freedom.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, financial freedom is a good way to put it, because you talk to some of these mom influencers about the financial realities that they face and, like, they can make a really, really significant amount of money by doing this. And there may be questionable things about that that we can talk about in a second, but just, I mean, first of all, how do they make this kind of money?

FORTESA LATIFI: Yeah, so you make the money in a few different ways. One is sponsored posts, so that’s where a brand pays for you to post something that is essentially a commercial.

And then they’re paid by YouTube and TikTok for views once you have a certain number of followers and subscribers, so you get paid directly by the platform.

You also get paid through affiliate links, which is like when someone messages a mom influencer and says, oh, where did you get that cup that you got for your daughter, and she posts the link and then you click it and you buy the cup, she makes money off of you clicking that link.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, and often you’ll see these posts, family pictures, doing whatever they may be doing, but everything in the post is linked out; you can buy it.

FORTESA LATIFI: Yes, yes, absolutely. I mean, everything is a commercial.

LAUREN GILGER: And they’re making how much money on this?

FORTESA LATIFI: Well, the top strata of mom influencers or family vloggers can make millions of dollars a year.

LAUREN GILGER: Millions, that’s wild. So we talked about babies and the algorithm kind of loving babies and pregnant moms, right? But this goes beyond that. Like, you’ve got mom influencers who document their kids’ first periods or kisses or like all the way through, you know, their growing up.

FORTESA LATIFI: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think people love to see intimate moments in a child’s life and I think that’s why we see these really intimate moments. I mean, I’ve seen kids shaving their legs for the first time, getting the sex talk, I’ve seen kids saying goodbye to their late grandmother’s casket. I mean, people really want to see those intimate moments, and family vloggers are serving those up.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so one of the really groundbreaking things that you do in this book is talk to the kids, the kids who were the subject of these things. What did they have to tell you? Like, what was it like to grow up on screen like that when, you know, your parents are the ones documenting it?

FORTESA LATIFI: You know, there really are a variety of experiences. Some kids that I talked to said, you know, this is great, I’m homeschooled so we can make more content, I already have my own YouTube channel with 600,000 subscribers and when I grow up I’m going to do family content.

And then other kids said, if it were up to me, none of this content would ever exist and I don’t feel like I had any privacy. And I think that nuance of knowing that those two things can be true at once is really important because when people try to flatten the narrative to say every child influencer is miserable, that’s just not true.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, and there has been a significant amount of backlash that you talk about as well, about people sort of saying, especially in recent years, like, this is not moral, you should not benefit financially from your kids in this way. What is the argument there?

FORTESA LATIFI: I think people feel that children cannot give informed consent about being online, especially when they’re really young, that even if you’re asking like a young child, like, is this OK for me to put on the internet, they just can’t understand it. And that they deserve privacy and they deserve a brief online footprint.

LAUREN GILGER: Let’s talk about the regulation aspect of this that you get at in the book. Like, you write that for a lot of these families it becomes more like a business arrangement than a family, right? Like, your parents are your boss in a way that that’s not really, you know, normal. And you point out that there’s no, like, child advocate on set for a family vlog, like there’s no way that anyone’s regulating this like there would be for child actors or models, right?

FORTESA LATIFI: No, I mean, the nature of child influencing is that it takes place alongside life and it takes place in the home, right? And so you can’t really send people into other people’s homes and say, tell us how much the child is working. And it’s also like it’s difficult to kind of parse what is work and what is not when a child is just living their lives and being recorded, you know? Like, the inherent nature of child influencing makes it really difficult to legislate.

LAUREN GILGER: I think the big difference here, right, like between a child actor and a kid whose parents are influencers in this way is that it’s their parents doing it, right? Like, I think it has to be assumed that they love their children and that’s supposed to be the protection, right?

FORTESA LATIFI: Yeah, I mean, I think especially in the U.S. where we so prize parental rights, it’s really difficult to say, oh, I know better than this parent who is making the choice for their kid.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So what did the parents have to say when you asked them some of these tough questions? Because you interviewed many of them as well.

FORTESA LATIFI: Yeah, I mean, some of them are grappling with these issues. They are wondering, kind of, am I taking it too far, does my child not have any privacy? But I think they’re just coming down on a different decision than maybe some of us would, but they’re also quite defensive of their work. They feel that, you know, that their kids love it, that they’re benefiting, that anything that is negative is outweighed by the positives.

LAUREN GILGER: What about some of that negative though, Fortesa, because this gets into, you know, child predator territory sometimes online?

FORTESA LATIFI: It does. I mean, we know there was that groundbreaking New York Times investigation about how predators in these chat rooms were talking about, you know, thank God for mom and kid influencers because there’s just all this content that we get to take in.

And the parents that I talked to, they were worried about the possibility of predators, and for some of them it wasn’t even the possibility; they had had confirmation that predators were watching their content because they’d gotten comments and messages, but it wasn’t enough to change how they show up online.

And I think they were like, we can’t live at the fear of these predators and just give up everything that we love doing, which I can understand kind of, but I think it’s really difficult as a mom myself to hear about the messages they were getting and just kind of moving on from that.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right, Fortesa Latifi, a journalist and author of the new book, “Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online.” Fortesa, thanks so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

FORTESA LATIFI: Thank you for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban and our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.