By Aditya Pandey
9th grade | William Fremd High School | Illinois

With lines from “Brazil Consumer Agency Demands Action After Pulitzer Center Report on Child Abuse AI Content” by Sofia Schurig, a Pulitzer Center reporting project

They are not pixels,
Not prompts in a machine’s hallucination.
They are children—
With scraped knees, crooked teeth,
And dreams not made for monetization.

In digital rooms without light,
Code became a weapon.
Not written to teach or heal,
But to mimic, to mock, to sell
What no one has a right to see.

An image faked is still a wound.
A voice forged is still a cry.
AI did not touch them,
But it taught others how to try.

Brazil heard the silence
Behind the screen’s dull glow.
A journalist saw the rot
That Meta’s filters let grow.
And from Núcleo’s ink
Came fire.

Senacon rose,
With the law in hand and grief in heart.
“We will watch the watchers,”
Said Damous,
And named what others tried to bury in code.

This is not just a glitch.
This is not just a “policy gap.”
This is the price of profit unchecked—
A marketplace of innocence
Sold by ghost accounts,
Promoted by algorithmic indifference.

Fanvue. Patreon.
No one is too big, too far.
Not when a child’s safety
Hangs between lines of unsupervised code
And unchecked desire.

Let this not be another press release.
Let this not be buried in translation.
The Senate’s bill waits—
But children cannot wait.

For every image faked,
A line of code must be questioned.
For every silence bought,
A platform must answer.

Because they are not data.
They are children.
And if AI can replicate a face,
Then we must replicate our courage,
Stronger, faster, louder—
Human.

Hi, I'm Aditya Pandey, a high schooler constantly chasing great ideas and working to translate them into something tangible. I try to create a difference, even if it is little, by teaching children chess via my nonprofit Chess for Change, developing a web app to facilitate studying, or simply losing myself in a great narrative. I delight in creative methods of gathering people together as well as writing and learning about new technologies. Although I don't have everything sorted out yet, I'm eager to keep learning, developing, and acting to leave the world a little nicer than when I discovered it.

Read more winning entries from the 2025 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.