A Reddit user created a homemade AI camera that can take photos of the world around them. It then creates descriptions of the images and feeds prompts to DALL-E 3, which creates a new AI image in different styles depending on what the user has set up.
Reddit user u/theleastevildr showed off the device they’d built in a video on Reddit last week. The device was created using a 3D-printed case and a Raspberry Pi controlling a small display and camera. It also includes two knobs, which the user can use to change the style and prompt before it is sent through.
We’ve seen similar approaches to using AI to take photos in the past. In fact, I previously wrote about a crazy AI camera that doesn’t even have a lens, but instead uses location data to create the image that the user is taking. Nuts, right? While this new homemade AI camera doesn’t go that far, it’s still a cool idea, and one that we’ll no doubt see iterated upon by others.
Even now, other Reddit users have taken to the comments to ask the creator how they made it. The creator shared that the trick was to use an API called Astica to create really long descriptions of the photo with several mentions of the style, an attempt to force DALL-E 3 to respect the style that the user wanted. Some have even offered up ideas for how to make the next iteration of the camera even cooler.
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One Reddit user suggested using an image+text>image model—like Midjourney—as that would allow the AI to use the actual image as part of the prompt input as well. This would definitely create an image that was more true to the original. Still, what the user has done with the homemade AI camera is already pretty impressive and just one way that folks are thinking outside the box for ways to use AI like DALL-E 3.
