An overwhelming blue light dominates the vision,
Erasing distant, sunlit memories.
Hesitant fingers tap the keys,
Surrounded by mugs, stacked papers and knotted charging cables.
There is a chaotic spirit here.
If I had the intriguing “poetry camera” in my hand right now, it might reveal this on a tiny roll of paper, instead of a pixelated, thermally printed image of my cluttered desk in a small, dimly lit home office. .
It may very well look like one Fujifilm Instax instant camera, but the poetry camera instead uses AI to turn what it sees through the lens (a Raspberry Pi camera module) into a short poem, sonnet, or haiku. It’s essentially a reverse AI image generator, from image to text if you will, using AI to piece together words from a real moment.
Creators Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather describe the open-source passion project on the poetry camera website as a “new way to make memories – away from screens, notifications and apps” and it’s the kind of project that warms the heart.
Ryan Mather shared videos of the poetry camera in action in Washington Square Park on Instagram via the account @flomerboy (see below), where members of the public have agreed to “have a poetry made of them”. That sentence was enough to convince me.
Like a cash register, the poetry camera uses its internal thermal printer to print a short, unique single poem on a receipt-like piece of paper, which is then shared with the group for their amusement.
Kelin and Ryan just wanted to “have fun with technology again”, and created the poetry camera using Raspberry Pi components, open source software, OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 3D printed the camera body, share instructions on how to build your own. For those in the know, it is possible to change the type of poetic forms that are created.
My word skills hardly compare to those of the GPT-4 AI-powered poetry camera, which puts the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” into practice – or at least worth a short poem, full of metaphors.
The creators share monthly updates via their newsletter and those who sign up will be the first to know about limited edition product releases, although there is no indication of the price of the poetry camera. It’s a new project and a use of AI in a camera that I can get behind.
A new project
The poetry camera
Prose over pixels