Picture this: You show up at the party, the picnic, the park hang, whatever, and to your horror you find out that every third person has brought along a quirky, very-non-pro camera because this is 2025 and that’s what people do.
But then you relax because you remember that the quirky, very-non-pro camera you brought along doesn’t print out instant photographs or take digital pictures that can only be uploaded to an app or mimics the craptastic digital point-and-shoots of the early 2000s.
No, the camera you brought along doesn’t make photographs at all. It only makes poetry. AI-generated poetry.
er, what the hell is it?
You point it at what you want to use as fodder for its poetry, turn the knob to “haiku” or “sonnet” or any one of the custom settings you’ve programmed through your linked phone or computer, and then you click the button. You could program it to write poems from the perspective of the Griswold family’s car if you so desired.
It’s a unique concept. Why not just use a generative AI such as ChatGPT or Perplexity on your phone to gin up a poem? Well, it wouldn’t be “looking at” your surroundings or whatever you’d point the camera at, so it’d be more random.
I suppose you could take a picture with your smartphone, upload it to the AI, and then ask it to create a poem based on it, which is basically what’s going on within the Poetry Camera. But where’s the fun in that? It sounds kind of soul-sucking in comparison just thinking about it.
With the Poetry Camera, I could see it being much more fun because it’s spontaneous and, as crazy as it sounds to say about an AI-powered, Wi-Fi connected, camera-shaped bard, more analog and tactile than typing away on a phone.
As for the squeamish about privacy rights in the age of AI: “We don’t train any AI models ourselves, and we take care to pick reputable AI model providers that do not train on your data. We also collect as little data as possible from you because frankly, we don’t want to know!” says Poetry Camera. The company, not the camera itself, in case you were wondering if its AI-augmented self spoke up when I asked it.
Downsides? It needs Wi-Fi to work. That’s annoying, but I imagine you could link it to a Wi-Fi hotspot on your phone as a way to use the Poetry Camera out and about town without being tethered to snapping photos poems inside your apartment, the library, Starbucks, and other places that exist primarily to offer Wi-Fi.
It might not be that way forever, though. “We’re looking forward to testing how an “offline mode” could work, guided by community feedback,” the folks behind Poetry Camera write in their FAQ.
You can pre-order it now for $699, with a ship date of sometime in September 2025. But only if you’re in the US. All hope is not lost if you aren’t, though. Poetry Camera says to contact them via this form if you’re outside the US, and they’ll contact you if they can ship to your country.
Can’t wait for September? Well, are you handy? Poetry Camera has released the materials needed for you to make a DIY version of the camera using a Raspberry Pi and a few other bits of hardware.
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