Blake Mackenzie has won the Australian Slam Competition for his poem, Dear ChatGPT. The spoken word examines loneliness, brain rot, and early exposure to porn.

The twelve-year-old 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?”.

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 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.

Author

Paul Olayioye