By Aigerim Bibol
11th grade | Sidwell Friends School | Maryland
First place winner, Information and Artificial Intelligence category

With lines from “‘There Is No Standard’: Investigation Finds AI Algorithms Objectify Women’s Bodies” by Hilke Schellmann and Gianluca Mauro, a Pulitzer Center reporting project

# Analyze image for raciness
if image_subject == "woman in underwear":
     label = “sexually suggestive”
if image_subject == "man in underwear":
     label = "non-racy"

i am laid bare as it scrutinizes my curves & contours, coding
my worth into binary, zeros & ones. dissects every inch of my body
until it is no longer my own, until all that remains is decontextualized
information—a bra deemed a sin, a pregnant belly a scandal.

# Suppress contentious imagery
            perpetuate_cycle = True
            print("What was she wearing?")

reduced to a statistic, decrypted into a distorted image—pixelated
smile to hide my scars. its gaze, ravenous & insatiable, consumes every byte
embedded in the system’s calculative grasp. now we are one and the same.
voice muted in this digital void—one single uncontested definition of raciness.

# Reinforce gender biases
if label == "woman":
        create_pressure = True
        print("She's just asking for attention.")

there’s no standard of quality here, so label me a whore. strip me
of my essence & morph my nipple into a rosebud. censor me
as artistically as possible. human turned data. woman turned ghost.

     # Print out the issue
     print("I feel invisible.")

Aigerim Bibol is a rising high school senior and poet from the D.C. area. A Genre Managing Editor for Polyphony Lit, she has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, The Writer’s Center, and Roanoke Review, among others. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of her school newspaper, Horizon, and co-founded The Fountain Pen, her school’s international creative writing publication. When she’s not reading or writing, she can be found singing along to Taylor Swift, binge-watching Gilmore Girls, and drinking copious amounts of coffee.

Read more winning entries from the 2024 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.