Finally, there is a serious AI hardware, a polaroid that can write poems.
Nowadays, artificial intelligence has been able to generate videos that are difficult to distinguish between true and false, and very artistic images.
Artificial intelligence is challenging the fields of literature, music, painting, film and television, etc., which originally belonged to artistic creation.When it is difficult for art to become a moat against AI, many people think that poetry may be the fortress that human beings were finally conquered in the intelligent age..
Poetry is regarded as the original origin of human literature. In the human society where there are no words, poetry has spread in civilization in the form of spoken language. It tests rhythm and rhythm in form, imagination and conciseness in expression, and it requires the expresser to combine experience, observation and consciousness. After all, the creation of poetry depends on the unique synaesthesia of human beings, so we can ask ChatGPT to write a poem about the moon, which will only be general, and it will not be able to see the unique moon with human beings at that time.
But,If ChatGPT has the ability to "see" the moon, give ititThinking gives observation??
Based on this idea, two designers and developers, Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather, churned out a device: let the camera "see", let artificial intelligence "feel", and use technical means to realize the most difficult expression in literature.
This is the Poetry Camera..
The core of the poetry camera is equipped with raspberry pie, a microcomputer only the size of a credit card, which can image and retrieve the API of GPT-4, thus opening up the "eyes" and "brain" of the device.
Hold up the poetry camera and take a photo casually.Computer vision algorithms will begin to analyze visual data, and artificial intelligence models will begin to interpret images, identify key elements, colors, environments, tone emotions and other information in images, and generate poems.And print it out in a way similar to a supermarket cashier’s note, just like polaroid "develops" a photo.
Photographing a poem can’t produce a film, which is more exciting and surprising than standing. What kind of poetry can it produce without looking at the publicity and the effect?
Source: TechCrunch
Some users photographed themselves playing with their mobile phones while drinking coffee at home in the morning. The creation of the poetry camera is:
Behind the camera, one person adjusts his sight,
Pixel space in the square range.
……
Sunlight penetrates the faded tulle,
In his hand, warm coffee circulates.
Conversation comes out, across the virtual boundary,
His reflection is a mirror image and appears on the screen.
On the bookshelf, the books are tilted and chattered silently.
Lush plants are the only life.
Wearing glasses, home became his calm batter,
In this wall, his world is scattered.
On an early morning in April 2024,
A new normal, quietly worn out.
@poetry.camera
It is not difficult to see that even after simple translation, the words it generates still have the unique "image sense" of poetry. The original text of the poetry camera is more obviously grammatically "deliberately subtle", for example, every paragraph is rhymed, such as lens, gazes, space, place and race in the first paragraph, and shears, steers, frontier and appends in the second paragraph. Poetic words are also used in words, such as writing morning as morning, just like writing "morning" as "morning" in Chinese.
Image source: TechCrunch
Another demonstration is to take a photo of the ceiling of the New York Public Library, which will interpret and create:
"Dance of shadows on the ceiling,
Like gold inlaid wood,
Deceived the eyes with the spring sky.
Shibei and Muliangxia
Stay in the station "
The two developers said that due to the open source nature of the poetry camera, users can actually change the source code according to their personal preferences, reprogram and choose different poetry forms, which are not limited to modern free verse, but also Japanese haiku or seven-character quatrains. Later, users may be given different models to choose from, such as changing from GPT-4 to Claude who is better at understanding words and semantics, or Dragonfly who is better at writing stories.
Two developers said "just want to enjoy the fun of technology" | Source: Poetry Camera
And the poetry camera will not be saved in any digital way.Users can’t see what the camera has taken, and they can’t copy and paste the text directly. If they want to keep a copy, they can only pick up the phone and take a picture of this poem.. Because the two developers believe that apart from technical problems (requiring servers and cloud platforms) and privacy issues, the instantaneity of poetry adds extra meaning to it, and the printed "poem strips" are instantly captured, randomly generated and unique entities exist.
At the moment when the screen dominates our daily life, this design of poetry camera presents the vision in a poetic and physical way, adding a touch of simulated romance to it besides numbers.
The idea of "taking pictures of what you see and letting the camera generate poems" is not only creative, but also seems to be quite difficult to realize? But in fact, you and I can both make a poetry camera.
Poetry camera is still in the stage of an "art project", and the two developers have no plans for large-scale commercialization yet. They just came up with the idea of a poetry camera and churned out a hardware that can realize the idea. The software and hardware they used are open source, so the two developers chose to make the detailed production process public on the website to encourage more users to DIY their own poetry cameras.
The core of the poetry camera is the micro-card computer Raspberry Pie, with some common accessories, plus the camera module of Raspberry Pie, a mini thermal printer, six batteries and a button.
The official sent the detailed DIY tutorial to Github | Source: Poetry Camera GitHub
The generation of poems needs to be matched with the API key of ChatGPT-4. When the shutter is pressed, the script will be triggered, and the collected pictures will be sent to GPT-4 to create a poem, and finally printed on the thermal receipt printer.
The two developers have written the script of the whole process. As long as they follow the detailed steps given by them step by step, they don’t need to be able to program and print in 3D, and a poetry camera can be built in the paper shell.
Debugging machine for two developers | Source: flomerboy
If Jobs believed in the "crossroads between technology and humanity" and made him create a digital product with great aesthetic feeling, then the poetry camera is an innovation in interactive form, giving us another possibility of interaction between technology and reality, breaking through boundaries, creating new forms of expression, and even further stimulating human observation and imagination in reverse.
This is also the philosophy of the two developers:Technology should be integrated into life, so that we can better appreciate daily life, instead of squeezing human living space..
Kelin Carolyn Zhan, the co-founder, said frankly the significance of the poetry camera: "For me, it is still art, it is about expression. Poetry camera is a tool to shape the world we want to see, which is also a world where people can play with new technologies: artificial intelligence is not all bad luck and pessimism, nor is it just to imitate human beings in a deeper, faster and worse way, but to create brand-new tools with new technologies, and then let the tools bring out the children in human hearts again. For this project, it’s not about making money-it’s about making those naive miracles possible again. 」
But beyond creativity, we have to wonder: the poems generated by GPT-4 are already in good shape, so is it only a matter of time before we surpass human beings in poetry creation?
When we look at the poems written by the poetry camera from the perspective of appreciation, we can feel the difference between artificial intelligence and poets’ poems. The poems written by artificial intelligence have more obvious "description" and "order", and the words are more coherent, such as "sunlight through faded gauze" and "shadow dance on the ceiling", which is more like describing a scene with elegant words, which lacks the sense of abstraction and the beauty of imagery that poetry is difficult to describe.
Just like the poetry publishing club in the GPT era, what is the significance and value of poetry? Mentioned in ","The appearance of GPT is a change of text order, which omits the concepts of world and author, and adds standardization and numerical algorithm in the middle, but it can’t imitate the image of poetry.」
Modern Poetry Written by Poet Xia Yu | Source: Yu Xia
The poet Ouyang Jianghe once said in an interview that "the vastness behind writing is human life and world outlook. These include the touch of life, the sublimation of life, the pain of life, the fear of life, the darkness of life, the love of life, the stupidity of life and the limitations of life. But artificial intelligence can’t have life, artificial intelligence is too smart, it has no pain, no sense of fragility and fear of life, and poetry is the product of these. Without such a source, it is meaningless to leave only beautiful sentences. 」
Poetry is not like go or formula, and it has no definite answer.When we question the ability of artificial intelligence to write poems, we are more questioning the origin of its poems..
Just like in the sci-fi movie blade runner in 1982, the artificial man Roy Buddy left the most poetic lines in the whole film before he died, which means that human beings, at least the creative team of blade runner, believe that after experiencing the feelings of life together, artificial intelligence can also create beautiful and humane poems.
Roy Buddy’s monologue before his death | Source: blade runner
Going back to the poetry camera, after we learned about this device, we didn’t feel a sense of urgency to be challenged by artificial intelligence, but it was even more novel. After all, when the device within our reach can express an art, it also unlocks a unique way for us to look around.
Just like Yu Xia, a poet, collaborated with ChatGPT in 2023 to complete a book of poetry entitled "Verify that you are human", she discussed poems, comments, languages, machines and jokes with ChatGPT … In the end, she said in an interview that "human beings who are supreme are engaged in robots again, substituting human grammar everywhere to motivate people’s emotions … Communication with ChatGPT, human language acquired through it,It also learns quickly, and I still hope that it will keep its mechanical nature and not easily enter human nature.. 」
There is still a gap between artificial intelligence and human beings in writing poems, and even a sense of spiritual crisis. We should pay more attention to how artificial intelligence fed with algorithms and data observes the neglected surroundings and whether it can inspire human poetry.
Head image source: Poetry Camera