This charming gadget writes bad AI poetry

I’ve never been as fascinated and frustrated by any gadget as I am by the Poetry Camera.

It is a delightful object. White and cherry red are paired with a woven strap of the same color, which looks cute and lo-fi. If I saw it on a store shelf I would absolutely pick it up.

But aside from the obvious appeal, I’m not quite sure what it is. I mean, I know what it is yes. This is a camera that uses artificial intelligence to create poetry instead of photos. You take a photo, and instead of printing it, you get an AI-generated poem inspired by the scene, printed on thermal receipt paper. But after printing dozens of poems, all I can say is that I feel frustrated, not inspired.

The camera itself has no screen, just a shutter button and a dial that lets you choose different poetry styles. It only works when connected to a Wi-Fi network, forwarding your images and prompts about your chosen camera settings to the cloud. After about 30 seconds, the printer spit out a poem. Tear it up like a grocery store receipt, read it to your friend/spouse/cat, rinse and repeat. The poems themselves all sound a bit like this poem, inspired by a photo I took in my kitchen:

Fingers bending the cup——
white cupboards preserve them
secret:
Another April

Poetry Camera is the product of a collaboration between former Twitter designer Kelin Carolyn Zhang and former Google employee Ryan Mather. They brought the concept to life through painstaking iterations, taking it from a wacky idea to a cardboard prototype and then into a functional product. they gave Thoughtful speech The highs and lows of their partnership were discussed at Figma’s annual conference last year; later in 2025, they parted ways. Zhang oversaw the production of the second batch of Poetic Cameras, which were assembled in a factory in Shenzhen as part of a residency at MIT rather than by hand with the help of friends in New York. The second round of cameras sells for half the original price: $349 instead of $699. This batch has been sold out; The third batch Commitment to May.

The mechanism of the poetry camera is very clever. How do I get a mobile app gadget that doesn’t have a screen or is not connected to Wi-Fi? You can generate QR codes using Poetry Camera’s simple web application. Point your camera at the code and it will automatically connect. Smart. There’s an LED around the shutter to show connection status or issues, and the printer also emits a message to let you know when it’s online. There’s something cute about a gadget communicating with users via printed physical messages.

You also have access to a camera-specific portal where you can customize the prompts set for each poem. That Makes me really interested. Poetry is great, but the sonnets and haiku in my entry about the shoe collection got old quickly.

The rewrite prompt sounds interesting. I learned that you have to actively direct it. no Write a poem, even if there’s a completely new prompt that doesn’t mention poetry. But once I did that, I successfully created a schema that prints the appropriate references jurassic park Based on what it recognizes in the scene. Another mode describes the current weather conditions when I take a photo from the window and gives me the forecast for the day. But not all tips work, and the trial-and-error process of figuring out why becomes tedious.

The camera will go to sleep on its own after a few minutes, and when it does, you’ll need to start it again and wait for it to reconnect to the network. When it fails, the camera prints one of several error messages, like a poem. This was cute the first time it happened, but became boring after six tries. It also means you don’t know what the problem is – did my cue symbol hit the guardrail? Am I standing too far away from my Wi-Fi router? Related: No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the camera to connect to my iPhone’s hotspot, so my experiment was limited to the house.

I have no doubt that Poetic Camera is the product of talent and dedication. But to me it feels like a product of artificial intelligence, as we all knew it years ago when we all first got excited about ChatGPT – when it was a novelty for LL.M.s to write something that looked like poetry, and we were all a little less jaded by chatbots.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think the value of an art form like poetry is directly tied to the humanity of its creator. I try to put this aside and accept poetry camera without judgment, but maybe I will never enjoy the pleasure of it. The Poetry Camera puts together words that sound profound and meaningful on the surface, but feel soulless and read like empty calories. Artificial intelligence can be a powerful tool for making software, but writing meaningful poetry requires at least a soul. No matter what venture capitalists say, computers don’t have one of those things.

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

Photography: Allison Johnson/The Verge