Most artificial intelligence models these days are being used to create images from text. This AI poetry camera does it the other way around. The result of an open source passion project of Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather, the poetry camera will write you a poem of what it is seeing.
The camera works much like an instant camera, printing out a snapshot of what it sees when you press the shutter button. However, instead of an image, that snapshot comes in the form of a haiku. The camera uses a Raspberry Pi camera module to visualize the scene in front of it, then writes a poem based off that image using GPT-4 from OpenAI. It then prints that poem with an internal thermal printer.
The camera body itself is 3D printed, and the instructions to build your own are available on GitHub. Mather took the poetry camera out for a test drive in Washington Square Park, where he offered people the chance to “have a poetry taken of them.”
