This AI-powered camera can write poetry based on the pictures you click with it; here’s how

There seems to be no end to what artificial intelligence can do today. From generating images and videos via a single textual prompt to summarising documents and drawing up entire PowerPoint presentations from scratch, AI has your back.

However, the latest innovation in AI allows it to write poetry. Now, you may think there’s nothing new about it since you can already create music and write lyrics through platforms such as Suno AI. However, what if we told you that there is a camera which can turn pictures you click on it, into poetry? Intrigued? Meet Poetry Camera.

Poetry Camera: How it came to be, and what it can do for you

Developed as a pet project by Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather, Poetry Camera appears to be a seemingly normal Polaroid camera on the outside, to the unassuming eye. Except that it prints poems instead of pictures.

The camera, which gets a single-board computer called Raspberry Pi, and is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 LLM, can analyse images for visual patterns such as colours, patterns, and even subjects and their emotions in a given photo, and generate poetry based on the same.

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What’s more, users can also choose the type of poetry they wish to generate; this includes free verse, sonnets, or even Haiku. The poems generated by the camera, which are printed out on a little slip of paper, are also digitally stored on the device itself.

The idea for the project initially came to them, Zhang and Mather say, when they first got access to the GPT-3 LLM and used it to generate prompts to play Dungeons & Dragons. Soon after though, they had an idea to create a camera with the same underlying technology, which could harness popular culture and social media to generate poetry. And so, Poetry Camera was born. The camera, according to them, helps bridge the gap between technology and art.

Poetry Camera: Where can you get your hands on one?

Now, for the coolest bit. Zhang and Mather, at least initially, had no plans to sell the Poetry Camera commercially. But now, reports suggest that they could potentially begin selling it in the near future.

What’s even cooler though, is the fact that anyone can make such a camera for themselves, as the developers have already shared the instructions to do so on their website. And bearing in mind how the technology behind it is open-source, anyone can make use of it as well. If you’re looking for something to wow your crush, it doesn’t get much better than this!