On a bright day, a man approaches a group of friends at Washington Square Park. The group replies yes to the man’s request, ‘if he could take their picture.’ 

The man pulls out what looks like a Polaroid camera and clicks. 

There was a brief silence, and then the camera started printing. 

Taking its audience aback, the camera printed a poem instead of a photograph. The man took the printed little paper slip between his fingers and read:

“On wooden boards
 A painted line of souls
Parallel parked in a 
Patch of quiet green
Hush dipped laughter 
Sifting through leaf canopies 
As crumbs crumble 
From paper-wrapped parcels
Bare legs brush against 
Cool arms of metal
As the sun filters through 
The dappled dance of leaves
A stolen hat whirls 
Teasing in the breeze
Friendship like brief shadows 
Folding into silver beams”.

The man was Ryan Mather. He co-developed the AI-powered Poetry camera with his friend Kelin Carolyn Zhang. Both Kelin and Ryan are New York-based designers. The camera, developed as a pet project by Kelin and Ryan, looks like a Polaroid camera to an unassuming eye.

The camera gets a single-board computer called Raspberry Pi and is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 LLM. It can analyse images for visual patterns such as colours, patterns, and even subjects and their emotions in a given photo and generate poetry based on the same.

Fantasy games to poetry

Users can also choose the type of poetry they desire- free verse, sonnets, or even Haiku. The poems generated by the camera, printed on a little slip of paper, are also digitally stored on the device.

In a statement, Zhang and Mather explained that they first got access to the GPT-3 LLM and used it to generate prompts for playing Dungeons and Dragons. Soon after, they decided to create a camera with the same technology. They believed it could harness popular culture and social media to generate poetry. Thus began Poetry Camera’s journey. 

The developers believe that the camera aids in bridging the gap between technology and art. In an Instagram post introducing the camera, Ryan remarked that it is a new way of taking photographs, where instead of focusing on aesthetics, “you get to focus on the feeling of being there”.

Anyone can make it!

Zhang and Mather have not commercialised the camera yet, but they have already shared the instructions for developing it on their website. Since the technology behind it is open-source, anyone can use it. 

The idea behind the Poetry Camera is undoubtedly unique. Models such as this can help develop creative AIs and strengthen human-AI interaction.

Content and Images: Poetry Camera

Ryan Mather Instagram