Amid the explosion in generative AI for digital art, we've also seen some strange concepts for AI cameras emerge in the past couple of years. There was the lensless Paragraphica and then the minimalist DreamGenerator, which would generate AI imagery supposedly based on a real scene. Perhaps the strangest idea was the Poetry Camera, which looked like a homemade Polaroid and turned images into sonnets and haiku.
It didn't surprise me that none of these caught on. But Camera Intelligence's Caira, which is billed as the the world's 'first mirrorless camera with Nano Banana', looks like it has much more potential for mass appeal. For a start, it's actually a camera.
