Poetry Camera: AI Transforms Your Photos into Verses

A Frustrating Experience

Never has a gadget charmed me so much while also frustrating me as the Poetry Camera. Its design is a true visual delight: white and cherry red, with a woven strap that perfectly complements its playful, retro look. If I spotted it in a store, I would inevitably be tempted to buy it. However, beyond its undeniable appeal, I question its true utility. In theory, I know what it is supposed to be: a camera that, instead of capturing photos, generates poems using artificial intelligence. Every time you take a picture, instead of printing an image, it produces a poem inspired by the scene, printed on thermal paper. However, after printing dozens of poems, I feel more frustration than inspiration.

Poetry According to AI

The camera has no screen, only a shutter button and a dial to choose different styles of poems. It only works when connected to a Wi-Fi network, transmitting the image and a prompt related to the camera's settings to the cloud. About 30 seconds later, the printer delivers a poem. You detach it like a supermarket receipt, read it to your friends, your partner, or even your cat, and then start again. The generated poems resemble this one, inspired by a photo taken in my kitchen: "Fingers curve the cup - the white cabinets keep their secret: another April."

Collaboration and Production

The Poetry Camera was born from the collaboration between Kelin Carolyn Zhang, a former designer at Twitter, and Ryan Mather, a former Google employee. Their concept evolved from an original idea to a cardboard prototype, and then to a functional product. They presented their project at the annual Figma conference, sharing the ups and downs of their collaboration; in 2025, they went their separate ways. Zhang oversaw the production of the second series of the Poetry Camera, assembled in a factory in Shenzhen as part of a residency with MIT, rather than manually with the help of friends in New York. This second series was offered at half price: $349 instead of $699. It is now sold out, and a third batch is expected in May.

Mechanics and Connectivity

The mechanisms of the Poetry Camera are ingenious. How do you connect a gadget without a screen or mobile app to Wi-Fi? By using a simple web app to generate a QR code. The camera scans it and connects automatically. Clever. A LED around the shutter indicates the connection status or issues, and the printer also outputs a message to inform you when it is online. There is something charming about a gadget communicating with its user through a physical printed message.

Limitations and Frustrations

The Poetry Camera has a lot to say, but I’m not sure it’s of good quality. You can access a portal for your camera where you customize the prompts for each poem setting. This really intrigued me. Poetry is great, but sonnets and haikus about the shoes in my hallway quickly become boring. Rewriting the prompts seemed fun. I learned that you have to actively indicate not to write a poem, even with a completely new prompt that doesn’t mention poetry. Once I did that, I managed to create a mode that prints an appropriate quote from Jurassic Park based on what it identifies in a scene. Another mode describes the current weather conditions when I take a photo through the window and gives me a forecast for the day. But not all my prompts worked, and the trial-and-error process to understand why became tedious.

The camera goes to sleep after a few minutes, and when that happens, you have to restart it and wait for it to reconnect to the network. When it fails, the camera prints one of a few error messages, styled like a poem. It was cute the first time, but it lost its charm after half a dozen attempts. This also means you don’t know exactly what the problem was: did my prompt hit a snag? Was I standing too far from the Wi-Fi router? I couldn’t connect the camera to my iPhone’s hotspot, no matter what I tried, so my experiments were limited to home.

Conclusion

I have no doubt that the Poetry Camera is the product of talented and dedicated minds. But for me, it feels like an artifact of AI as we knew it a few years ago, when we were all first excited by ChatGPT — when an LLM writing something that resembles a poem was a novelty and we were all a bit less fatigued by chatbots. Call me old-school, but I believe the value of an art form like poetry is directly tied to the humanity of its creator. I tried to set this aside and embrace the Poetry Camera without prejudice, but perhaps I was never really going to have a good time with it. The Poetry Camera assembles words that seem superficially deep and meaningful, but also appear devoid of soul and read like empty calories. AI can be a powerful tool for creating software, but writing meaningful poetry requires, at the very least, a soul. A computer doesn’t have one, no matter what venture capitalists may say to the contrary. I’m still not sure what the Poetry Camera is, but I know one thing: it’s not for me.