A wide blue light dominates the view,
Erasing distant sunlit memories.
Tentative fingers hitting the keys,
Surrounded by cups, piled up papers and knotted charging cables.
Here lives a chaotic mind.
If the intriguing 'poetry camera' were in my hand now, that's the kind of end product I could develop on its little roll of paper, rather than a thermally printed pixelated image of my messy desk in a small home office with low light. .
It may well look like a Fujifilm Instax Instant Camera, but the Poetry Camera uses AI to turn what it sees through the lens (a Raspberry Pi camera module) into a short poem, sonnet, or haiku. It's essentially a reverse AI image generator, image-to-text so to speak, that uses AI to reconstruct words from a real-world moment.
Creators Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather describe the exciting open source project in poetry chamber website as a “new way to create memories, away from screens, notifications and apps” and it is the kind project that warms the heart.
Ryan Mather has shared videos of the poetry camera in action in Washington Square Park on Instagram via the @flomerboy account (see below), where members of the public have agreed to “have their poetry taken.” That sentence was enough to leave me speechless.
Much like a cash register, the Poetry Camera proceeds to print a short, one-of-a-kind poem on a receipt-like sheet of paper using its internal thermal printer, which is then shared with the group, much to your amusement.
Kelin and Ryan just wanted to “have fun with technology again” and created the poetry camera using Raspberry Pi components, open source software, OpenAI's GPT-4 and 3D printed the camera body, sharing instructions on how to build the your own. For the more informed, it is possible to modify the type of poetic forms created.
My word skills hardly compare to the AI-powered GPT-4 poetry camera, which puts into practice the saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” or at least a short poem packed with metaphors is worth it .
The creators share monthly updates through their newsletter and those who subscribe are the first to know about limited edition product releases, although there's no indication what the price of the poetry camera will be. It's a novel project and a use of AI in a camera that I can get behind.
A novel project
The poetry chamber
Prose about pixels
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