Loneliness, brain rot and early exposure to porn. Twelve-year-old Blake Mackenzie has summed up many of the horrors of growing up in the age of AI in a 90-second poem called Dear ChatGPT, making him the standout winner of this year’s youth prize at the 2026 Australian Poetry Slam competition.
The year six student from Newcastle won over the 10 judges at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday night with smart and succinct lines, such as “You’re designed to addict us and never contradict us” and “Your friendship is endless so why do I feel friendless?”.
The judges, who were randomly selected from the audience, might have been even more impressed to hear Blake wrote the poem only the day before.
“I was making them as I went through [the competition],” he told Guardian Australia on Monday. “I just kept winning and it was all because I wrote a cool poem in class one day.”
The Australian Poetry Slam competition is now in its 22nd year. It ran 65 heats in 60 towns and cities across the country to find 16 finalists.
As the youth winner, Blake shares a prize package worth $20,000 with Alice Springs poet Bivor, who won the adult category for his poem Politics is Doing You.
Both poets will spend the coming year representing at writing and poetry festivals – Blake in Australia and Bivor in Indonesia and Singapore.
Blake entered the competition on the encouragement of his teacher, Mrs Welsh. She came to both his first heat performance and the state final in the lead up to Sunday night’s grand final.
“She got a T-shirt that says ‘I’m Blake’s teacher’. I wouldn’t be here without her telling me to enter this, assuring me that I was a good poet. She’s been a really big part of this.”
Dear ChatGPT was inspired by how Blake’s friends use chatbots and AI generally, and in a really needless way, he said.
“Instead of reading the book we’re learning in class, they get ChatGPT to summarise each chapter – and by the time you’ve read the summary you could have read the chapter. It’s such a waste of water,” he said.
“The more we use it, the more power we give it,” Blake said. “More water will be wasted. It’s totally unnecessary.”
Sydney Water has said as much as 250 megalitres of water would be needed each day to service datacentres in Sydney alone by 2035 – a volume larger than Canberra’s total drinking water. “That’s eventually so much water that could be given to people who have none,” Blake said.
The 12-year-old did not use AI to help him write the poem – “No, that’s very not allowed,” he said – and he avoids using chatbots generally.
Though he does not know any other kids his age who enjoy spoken word poetry, he thinks it a good way to raise some of the issues he is passionate about. “I try to talk about things that affect people my age,” he said. “I feel really proud of it. I could not be more happy with it.”
Blake’s first poem of the night, which got him into the final, was called I Love My Country – “about Australia and all its inequalities and racism,” he said. In the poem, he decried the divisiveness of political parties, such as One Nation, and the fact that Australia was built on stolen land. “It’s hard to love your country if you don’t feel welcome in your own country,” he said.
“Literally every single person’s poem was on a whole different level. They were so good,” said Blake. “One of the judges came up to me and said ‘I didn’t vote for you just because you’re a kid. I did it because your poem was amazing.’”
