AI is really intriguing, and while we’ve seen it turn text prompts into art – like Midjourney – a new camera app from artist Damjanski is doing something different. Instead of turning text into images, Damjanski’s app, Pamera – The Poem Camera, turns photos into short poems.
It’s an intriguing idea that leaves much room for you to play with it. For instance, taking photos of the kitchen area in my house, the camera app created a cute poem capturing some of the different noises or items you might see in that area. The application utilizes the GPT-4 language model to generate the poems, and it does so all on your iPhone.
While toying around with the app has been amusing, it also showcases how wonky AI can sometimes be. Where Midjourney and other apps that utilize language models to generate art can misinterpret things, the Pamera app doesn’t always take what it’s viewing into account, oftentimes adding things into the scene.
You can see a couple of the poems that I got from taking similar shots above. I don’t have the images to showcase, but it is interesting to see the way that the service interprets almost the exact same scene in different ways. Capturing other scenes can give some amazing results, too, with Gizmodo sharing several captured from the New York City streets in a report of its own.
The effectiveness of this little AI photo poetry app might be a bit wonky, but it’s still a really fun and nifty idea, and its something I could see them improving on even more as language models are updated, and even with the release of GPT-5 somewhere down the line, once OpenAI has sorted out its plans for the next iteration.
For now, though, the app is at least fun to mess around with. It does cost $2.99 on the App Store, and since it doesn’t offer the option to upload photos, you’ll have to settle for poems of new photos you take on the spot. However, the option to upload is planned for a future update, according to some reports.
