Beat My AI: Poetry: Contender (excerpt)

Overview
Beat My AI is an online magazine that stages a direct confrontation between human and machine authorship. Its 'Contender' section publishes original poems that contain a clearly marked AI-generated portion. Poets are invited to submit a human-written substitute for that AI segment, matching the length, style, and content of the surrounding human-made work. The project is not a contest with a single winner but an ongoing, rolling archive of human responses to algorithmic text. The curatorial premise is rigorous: the submitted excerpt must integrate seamlessly with the existing poem, respecting its formal and tonal constraints. This is not a free-form prompt but an exercise in close reading, imitation, and creative intervention. The magazine provides the original poem and the AI segment to be replaced; the poet's task is to produce a passage that could stand alongside the human-authored lines without disruption. Because the call is rolling and fee-free, there is no deadline pressure or financial barrier. The magazine's focus is on the quality of the response and its fidelity to the source poem. Accepted contenders are published online, contributing to a growing dialogue about authorship, creativity, and the role of AI in literary production. The editorial vision is discerning: it seeks work that is not merely reactive but genuinely poetic, demonstrating the continued vitality of human craft in conversation with machine output.