By Elise Matney
7th Grade | Blake Middle School | Minnesota
First place contest winner, Information and AI category
With lines from "How Your Data Ends Up in AI Training Sets" by Niamh McIntyre, a Pulitzer Center reporting project
The machine is wise—alive.
She hunts us, hungry.
Scrambling for fresh sources.
Insatiable.
Usually invisible—
but I feel her electric pulse.
Her 200,000 eyeballs burn through me, piercing.
She is near.
Prodded. Processed.
On the playground.
I fall—slip into her grasp:
snow-covered, tagged, scraped.
Recognized. Monetized.
Tears.
Desperate for anonymity.
For freedom.
Cheerfully riding my bike,
playing tag—
but not to be tagged,
not to be labeled,
not to be fed
back into
her
m a c h i n e.
She rages on.
Weaving through the details of my person,
a web of her own construction—
a chokehold on my privacy.
Relentless.
Ruthless.
She violates human rights.
I steady myself.
Desperate to opt out—
but she knows my patterns.
Panic sets in.
Take another action.
Boom.
Crackdown.
She falters—
for a moment.
A rare peek inside:
Long-forgotten relics,
re-train
re-frame
reclaim my rights.
Elise Matney is an eighth grader from Minneapolis, Minnesota, with a long-standing passion for writing and journalism. Elise is a regular contributor to her school newspaper and her neighborhood magazine. She is always eager to uncover and share unappreciated stories that matter. Elise’s early education in a Quaker school sparked a deep commitment to truth-seeking, which continues to fuel her love of research and reporting. Her ultimate dream is to become a journalist for The New York Times or NPR.
When she’s not writing, Elise enjoys adventures with her dog, Chloe, supports a recently resettled family with two girls her age, and stays active playing sports that include tennis, dance, gymnastics, diving, and lacrosse.
Read more winning entries from the 2025 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.