This fascinating gadget writes bad AI poetry

I have never been as charmed and disappointed by a gadget as I am by the Poetry Camera.

It is a delightful thing. White and cherry red with a color-matching woven strap, it looks playful and adorable lo-fi. If I saw it on a store shelf, I would definitely pick it up.

But besides being obviously attractive, I’m not exactly sure what it is. I mean, I know what it is Is. This is a camera that creates AI poems instead of photographs. You take a photo, and instead of printing a photo, you get an AI-generated poem inspired by the scene, printed on thermal receipt paper. But after publishing dozens of poems, I’m left feeling only frustrated rather than inspired.

There’s no screen on the camera, just a shutter button and a dial that lets you choose a different poetry style. It only works when connected to a Wi-Fi network, relaying your image and sending a signal to the cloud associated with the camera settings you choose. About 30 seconds later, the printer spits out a poem. Tear it up like you tear up a grocery store receipt, read it to your friends/husband/wife/cat, rinse and repeat. These poems all sound something like this, inspired by a photo I took in my kitchen:

Fingers rotate the mug-
white cabinets hold them
Secret:
another april

Poetry Camera is the product of a collaboration between ex-Twitter designer Kellin Caroline Zhang and ex-Googler Ryan Mather. He brought this concept to life through painstaking iteration, taking it from a strange idea to a cardboard prototype to a functional product. they gave a thoughtful presentation about the ups and downs of their collaborative relationship at Figma’s annual conference last year; They later separated in 2025. Zhang oversaw the production of Batch 2 of the Poetry Camera, which was assembled in a factory in Shenzhen as part of a residency with MIT, rather than manually with the help of friends in New York. The second round of cameras went on sale for half its original price: $349 instead of $699. That batch has been sold; a third batch Has been promised for May.

The mechanics of the Poetry Camera are excellent. How do you get a Wi-Fi connected gadget without a screen or mobile app? You use Poetry Camera’s simple web app to generate the QR code. Point the camera at the code and it will automatically link. clever. There’s an LED around the shutter that tells you about connection status or problems, and the printer also sends a message to let you know when it’s online. There’s something about a gadget that communicates with its user with a physical, printed message that’s quite beautiful.

You can also access a portal for your particular camera where you can customize the prompts for each verse setting. He I got really interested. Poetry is great, but the sonnet and haiku in my entry about a series of shoes got old very fast.

It seemed fun to rewrite the prompts. I learned that you have to actively direct it No To write a poem, even with a completely new prompt that doesn’t mention poetry. But once I did that, I successfully created a mode that prints the proper quotes. Jurassic Park Based on what it recognizes in a scene. Another mode describes the current weather conditions after I take a photo out the window and gives me the forecast for the day. But all my hints didn’t work, and the trial-and-error process of finding the cause became tedious.

The camera automatically deactivates after a few minutes, and when that happens, you’ll need to restart it and wait for it to reconnect to the network. When this fails, the camera prints one of a few error messages in the form of a poem. It was good the first time it happened, but after half a dozen attempts it wore thin. It also means you don’t know exactly what the problem was – did my sign hit some guardrails? Was I standing too far from the Wi-Fi router? RELATED: No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t connect the camera to my iPhone’s hotspot, so my experimentation was limited to home.

I have no doubt that Poetry Camera is the product of talented, dedicated minds. But it seems to me like an artefact of AI as we knew it years ago when we all first delighted in ChatGPT – when an LLM writing something that looked like a poem was a novelty and we were all a little less tired of chatbots.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think the value in an art form like poetry is directly tied to the humanity of its creator. I tried to put it aside and free the Poetry Camera from bias, but I’ll probably never be able to have a good time with it. Poetry Camera puts together words that seem deep and meaningful on the surface, but also seem soulless and read like empty calories. AI can be a powerful tool in creating software, but writing meaningful poetry requires at least a soul. Computers don’t have either of those, no matter what venture capitalists say otherwise.

I’m still not sure what Poetry Camera is, but I know one thing: it’s not for me.

Photography by Alison Johnson/The Verge