I’ve never been as charmed and frustrated by one gadget as I have with the Poetry Camera.

It’s a delightful object. White and cherry red with a color-matched woven strap, it looks playful and adorably lo-fi. If I saw it on a store shelf, I’d absolutely pick it up.

But aside from obviously appealing, I’m not exactly sure what it is. I mean, I know what it is. It’s a camera that makes AI poems instead of photos. You take a picture, 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 report feeling frustrated instead of inspired.

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

Fingers curve the mug-
white cabinets hold their
secret:
another April

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

The mechanics of the Poetry Camera are nifty. How do you get a gadget without a screen or a 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’ll link up automatically. Clever. There’s an LED around the shutter that communicates connection status or problems, and the printer also spits out a message to let you know when it’s online. There’s something about a gadget communicating with its user with a physical, printed message that’s sort of cute.

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

Rewriting the prompts sounded fun. I learned that you have to actively instruct it not to write a poem, even with an entirely new prompt that doesn’t mention poetry. But once I’d done that, I successfully created a mode that prints an appropriate quote from Jurassic Park based on what it identifies in a scene. Another mode describes the current weather conditions when I take a picture out the window and gives me a forecast for the day. But not all of my prompts worked, and the trial-and-error process of figuring out why became tedious.

The camera puts itself to sleep after a couple of minutes, and when it does, you need to start it up again and wait for it to reconnect to the network. When it fails, the camera prints out one of a handful of error messages, styled as a poem. This was cute the first time it happened, but it wore thin after a half-dozen attempts. It also means you don’t know exactly what the problem was — did my prompt hit some guardrails? Was I standing too far from the Wi-Fi router? Related: I couldn’t get the camera to connect to my iPhone’s hotspot no matter what I tried, so my experimentation was bound to the house.

I have no doubt that Poetry Camera is the product of talented, dedicated minds. But it feels to me like an artifact of AI as we knew it years ago when we were all first delighted by ChatGPT — when an LLM writing something that looks like a poem was a novelty and we were all a little less weary of chatbots.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think the value in an art form like poetry is directly tied to the humanity of its creator. I tried to set this aside and accept the Poetry Camera free of bias, but maybe I was just never going to have a good time with it. The Poetry Camera puts together words that kind of sound deep and meaningful on the surface, but also feel soulless and read like empty calories. AI can be a powerful tool in making software, but writing meaningful poetry requires, at a bare minimum, a soul. A computer doesn’t have one of those, no matter what venture capitalists may say otherwise.

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

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge