This charming tool writes bad AI poems

I have never been so enchanted and frustrated with a single tool as I have been with the Hair Camera.

He is a delightful being. In white and cherry red with a matching woven belt, it looks fun and cool. If I see it on a store shelf, I’ll definitely pick it up.

But apart from its obvious appeal, I’m not quite sure what it is. I mean, I know what it is He is. It’s a camera that creates AI poems instead of pictures. You take a photo, and instead of a photo print, you get an AI-generated poem inspired by the scene, printed on thermal receipt paper. But after printing dozens of poems, I can only express my feeling of frustration rather than inspiration.

There’s no screen on the camera itself, just a shutter button and a dial that lets you choose a different style for the poem. It only works when connected to Wi-Fi, transmitting your photo and a prompt associated with your chosen camera setup to the cloud. After about 30 seconds, the printer printed a poem. Tear it up like you would a grocery store receipt, read it to your friends/wife/cat, rinse and repeat. All the poems themselves look like this one, inspired by a photo I took in my kitchen:

Fingers bend the cup-
White bearing cabinets
secret:
Another April

Hair Camera is a collaboration between Cailin Carolyn Chang, a former Twitter designer, and Ryan Mather, a former Google employee. They brought this concept to life through painstaking iteration, taking it from a whimsical idea to a cardboard prototype to a working product. They gave Thoughtful presentation At last year’s annual Figma conference about the highs and lows of their collaborative relationship; Later in 2025, they parted ways. Zhang oversaw the production of Batch 2 of the Hair Camera, which was assembled in a factory in Shenzhen as part of his residency with MIT and not by hand with the help of friends in New York. The second round of cameras has gone on sale for half their original price: $349 instead of $699. This batch has been sold. Third batch Promised for May.

The poetic camera mechanisms are elegant. How can you get a gadget without a screen or mobile app connected to Wi-Fi? You can use Poetry Camera’s simple web app to generate a QR code. Point your camera at the symbol and it will automatically link. Maher. There is an LED around the shutter that tells you connection status or problems, and the printer also emits a message to let you know when the connection is online. There’s something about a gadget communicating with its user through a physical printed message that’s kind of nice.

You can also access your camera portal where you can customize prompts for each poem setting. Which It made me really interested. Poetry is great, but the sonnets and poems about the shoe line in my post get old very quickly.

Rewriting the prompts sounded fun. I learned that you must actively guide him no To write a poem, even with a completely new prompt that doesn’t mention poetry. But once I did that, I successfully created a mode that would print the appropriate quote Jurassic Park Depending on what he identifies in the scene. Another mode describes the current weather conditions when I take a photo out the window and gives me the forecast for the day. But not all of my prompts worked, and the process of trial and error to figure out why became arduous.

The camera itself goes into sleep mode after a few minutes, and when it does, you’ll need to turn it back on and wait for it to reconnect to the network. When it fails, the camera prints one of a few error messages, in the form of a poem. This was nice the first time it happened, but it became weak after six tries. It also means you don’t know exactly what the problem is – has the claim hit some guardrail? Was I standing too far from the Wi-Fi router? RELATED: I couldn’t connect the camera to my iPhone hotspot no matter what I tried, so my experience was home-bound.

I have no doubt that Poetic Camera is the product of talented and dedicated minds. But it seems to me that it’s an artifact of AI as we knew it years ago when we were all first thrilled with ChatGPT – when LLM writing something that looked like a poem was new and we were all less tired of chatbots.

You may call me old-fashioned, but I believe that the value in an art form like poetry is directly related to the humanity of its creator. I tried to put that aside and accept the poetic camera without prejudice, but I may never have been able to have a good time with it. The poetic camera collects 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 making software, but writing meaningful poetry requires, at the very least, a soul. The computer doesn’t have one of those things, no matter what venture capitalists might say otherwise.

I’m still not sure what a poetic camera is, but I know one thing: it’s not for me.

Photography by Alison Johnson/The Verge