“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing,” Joanna Maciejewska once said – and while the Poetry Camera defies that very statement, it’s a perfect representation of how technology can help foster collaborative art between humans and AI. The Poetry Camera isn’t your average handheld instant shooter. Sure, it has a lens, and a shutter button, and it prints out stuff – but unlike Polaroid that prints pictures out on film, the Poetry Camera captures a scene, identifies its elements, and then uses AI to make a beautiful poem based on what the camera clicked.
The brain-child of Kelin and Ryan, the Poetry Camera is a toy that turns photography into something much more fun and experimental. Instead of composing powerful visuals by framing your shot perfectly the way a photographer does, you’re invited to click photos of subjects that make for great poetry. Click a funny photo of a friend, a photo of a squirrel with an acorn, or maybe a baby with a cute cap. The AI reads the photo, identifies the elements, and writes a short poem on it, using AI in a way that feels more fun and art-driven and less existential or scary.
Designers: Kelin ‘Caroline’ Zhang & Ryan Mather
Essentially, the Poetry Camera runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 chip, with a Camera Module 3 connected to an Adafruit Mini Thermal Printer. Connection to OpenAI’s API allows the camera to feed AI images, and have it generate poetry as a result. The setup is fairly simple (you can find the entire if you want to build your own), and it all fits inside this adorable 3D-printed enclosure with just two controls – a shutter button for clicking the photo, and a knob that lets you adjust the number of verses you want the camera to print. In a way, think of it as an ‘exposure’ dial that gives the AI more leeway to see smaller details and conjure up longer poems with more depth as a result.
The Poetry Camera is a pet project for now, as Kelin and Ryan aren’t preparing for mass production. Limited drops of the camera will be available to people who sign up for the newsletter on the , although the price is unknown at the moment.
This is far from the first time we’ve seen AI make its way into indie camera projects. Back in 2018 (long before GPTs), Dan Macnish created a , while in 2023, we got the that used location and time data to create prompts that generated AI images. The Poetry Camera is, in ways, similar to the Paragraphica in the sense that it uses an AI to generate something new from an input. While Paragraphica did make images, like cameras are supposed to, the Poetry Camera turns scenes into sonnets, and if this is what the AI uprising will look like, count me in!
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