Cameras take photos – that’s pretty much the very definition of a camera. But I recently came across a camera that does not, in fact, take photos – it writes poetry.
Instead of spitting out instant photos, Poetry Camera prints out AI-generated poetry using a thermal printer. Those poems are based on what the camera’s lens sees, but the Poetry Camera doesn’t store any photos.
Poetry Camera started out as an art project by co-creators Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather. But, Poetry Camera gradually became more than an art project, and after several reiterations of making custom orders by hand, the creators worked with Seeed Studio and the MIT Research at Scale residency to manufacture the camera rather than making each one by hand.
The current version of Poetry Camera uses an AI model from Anthropic’s Claude generative text model – and an internet connection is required for it to work. The dials on the camera don’t adjust things like shutter speed and aperture, but allow the user to change from haiku to sonnet to free verse.
As both a photographer and a writer (though admittedly not much of a poet), the Poetry Camera immediately grabbed my attention. It’s not the AI-written poems – one review at The Verge says the camera writes “bad poetry” – that intrigues me.
The camera itself feels like an experimental mix of both art and technology, and the result of humans asking weird questions like, “What would happen if a camera didn’t take photos but wrote something instead?” Asking weird questions feels essential to creating art, and while the poems that the camera spits out lack a human soul, creating the Poetry Camera itself feels like an art project.
“What I’m not trying to do is have AI write a poem that I could’ve written on my own or draw a picture that I could’ve drawn on my own,” Zhang shared in a social media post. “These technologies are so new that it’s really easy to come in with a unique perspective and make something that the world hasn’t seen before. I’d encourage more artists to do that, like engage with AI with an open mind and then think about what they might want to do that wasn’t possible before without it.”
The Poetry Camera is available to preorder already built for $349, but the design is also shared as open source, so DIYers can build their own with parts from Raspberry Pi.
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