It looks like a homemade Polaroid camera, probably built with one of the best 3D printers around. But this AI-powered device doesn't take photos at all. It 'possesses' the poems.
The Poetry Camera transforms the visual input received through its lens into an AI-generated poem that describes the scene. It's like an AI image generator but in reverse: it takes a real image and produces something comparable to the prompts used in the text-to-image tool, but with more poetic language.
Poetry Camera is an open source passion project created by Kellan Caroline Zhang and Ryan Mather. They describe it as “a new way to make memories — away from screens, notifications and apps.” The device features a Raspberry Pi single-board computer to capture and process images, and then OpenAI's GPT-4 to create poetry based on extracted data about objects, situations, colors, patterns and other elements. Uses an AI model. Tech-savvy users can modify the source code to choose from a variety of poetic forms, such as sonnet, haiku or free verse.
The camera maker is testing it with photographers and says it plans a limited release soon. The camera throws around metaphors a fair amount, and varies between literal and whimsical. A park bench becomes a 'plank of wood' and a boy on a motorbike goes on a 'chrome-plated pilgrimage'.
Mather told TechCrunch that the device was conceived as a reaction to Instagram culture, which produced text rather than images. “Everyone prefers the book version to the movie, so it's like capturing moments,” he said (is this the moment I should point out that generally the best books AI has (Wasn't written?)
@kelin.online ♬ Original Sound – Kelin
Despite all the concerns about AI, and despite the fact that the 'poems' are not exactly original works of literature, I really like this project. It is AI art at its most philosophical, pondering the question of what is a photograph, and what is poetry? If we rely on machines (the camera) to capture the visual record of memory, can we rely on a different type of machine to create a literary record? Is the camera of poetry the same for literature as the camera of painting itself?
Is a picture really worth a thousand words (or a few dozen for that matter)? And, who says more, a picture or a poem? What would be the result if we fed the resulting poem into an AI image generator to create a new image? Will it be detectable? The questions are endless, which is usually the hallmark of good art. That's something we can't say about the first AI romance movie.
For more AI art projects, check out AI Fake Retro Movie Trailers for Movies That Never Were
