This charming gadget writes bad AI poetry

I have never been more charmed and frustrated by a gadget than with the Poetry Camera.

It’s a lovely object. White and cherry red with a matching colored woven strap, it has a playful and adorably lo-fi look. If I saw it in a store I would pick it up in a heartbeat.

But other than being obviously attractive, I’m not sure what that is. I mean, I know what it is East. It’s a camera that creates AI poems instead of photos. You take a photo and instead of printing a photo, you get an AI-generated poem inspired by the scene, printed on thermal receipt paper. But after printing dozens of poems, I can only say that I feel frustrated instead of inspired.

There’s no screen on the camera itself, just a shutter button and a dial that lets you choose a different poem style. It only works when connected to a Wi-Fi network, relaying your image and a prompt related to your chosen camera setting to the cloud. About 30 seconds later, the printer spits out a poem. Tear it out like you would a grocery receipt, read it to your friends/spouse/cat, rinse and repeat. The poems themselves all look a bit like this one, inspired by a photo I took in my kitchen:

Fingers bend the cup-
white cabinets hold their
secret:
another April

The Poetry Camera is the result of a collaboration between Kelin Carolyn Zhang, ex-Twitter designer, and Ryan Mather, ex-Googler. They brought the concept to life through careful iterations, taking it from a wild idea to a cardboard prototype to a working product. They gave a thoughtful presentation at Figma’s annual conference last year about the ups and downs of their collaborative relationship; later in 2025, they separated. Zhang oversaw the production of Poetry Camera Batch 2, assembled in a factory in Shenzhen as part of a residency with MIT rather than manually with the help of friends in New York. The second series of cameras went on sale for half its original price: $349 instead of $699. This lot is sold out; a third batch is promised for May.

The mechanics of the Poetry Camera are clever. How to get a gadget without a screen or mobile app connected to Wi-Fi? You use Poetry Camera’s simple web app to generate a QR code. Point the camera at the code and it will automatically connect. Clever. There’s an LED around the shutter that communicates connection status or issues, and the printer also emits a message to let you know when it’s online. There’s something about having a gadget communicate with its user with a physical printed message that’s kind of cute.

You can also access a portal for your particular camera where you can customize prompts for each poem setting. That That really interested me. Poetry is great and all, but the sonnets and haikus about the shoe line in my article got old pretty fast.

Rewriting the prompts sounded like fun. I learned that you have to actively teach him not write a poem, even with a brand new invitation that doesn’t mention poetry. But once done, I managed to create a mode that prints a proper quote from Jurassic Park based on what it identifies in a scene. Another mode describes current weather conditions when I take a photo out the window and gives me a forecast for the day. But not all of my prompts worked, and the process of trial and error to figure out why became tedious.

The camera goes to sleep after a few minutes, and when it does, you need to restart it and wait for it to reconnect to the network. If it fails, the camera prints one of the few error messages, in the form of a poem. It was cute the first time it happened, but it wore out after half a dozen attempts. This also means you’re not sure what the problem was: did my prompt hit any guardrails? Was I standing too far from the Wi-Fi router? Related: I couldn’t connect the camera to my iPhone’s hotspot no matter what I tried, so my experimentation was home related.

I have no doubt that Poetry Camera is the product of talented and dedicated minds. But it seems to me to be an artifact of AI as we knew it years ago when we were all first excited about ChatGPT – when an LLM writing something that sounds like a poem was a novelty and we were all a little less tired of 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 tried to put that aside and accept the Poetry Camera without bias, but maybe I was just never going to have a good time with it. The Poetry Camera brings together words that seem deep and meaningful on the surface, but also seem soulless and read like empty calories. AI can be a powerful tool in creating software, but writing meaningful poetry requires, at the bare minimum, a soul. A computer doesn’t have one, no matter what venture capitalists say.

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

Photography by Allison Johnson/The Verge