The Paragraphica, which is Bjorn Karmann's camera, uses filters and geolocation data, like the weather, to make a stream of text that is then turned into a "photo," according to his website. The camera looks like a normal point-and-shoot, but instead of a lens, it has a red device that looks like a TV antenna stuck where the lens should be, according to the website Digital Camera World. Karmann told that the strange element is just a sculpture based on the star-nosed mole, which is blind but can see its surroundings through its nose.
Karmann wrote on his website, "The viewfinder shows a real-time description of where you are, and if you press the trigger, the camera will make a scintigraphic representation of the description." Photographers who use the device can control how the picture turns out with three actual dials on top of the camera body, where knobs for things like shutter speed and film speed would normally be. Karmann wrote that the first knob works like the focal length on a regular camera lens, but it is used to narrow the area where the camera looks for data. A picture of the dial shows that the distance seems to go from about 10 feet to infinity.
The second knob changes the way the A.I. picture spreads out. In the process of making a picture with A.I., models add Gaussian noise, out of which the image appears. Karmann said that noise was "like film grain." Karmann called the third knob a "guidance scale" that gives the A.I. model information about how closely it should follow the produced text prompt. Karmann used a Raspberry Pi 4, which is a single-board computer about the size of a credit card, and a 3D-printed case with custom circuits to make the camera. With the Stable Diffusion API, the program is written in Noodl and Python.
Jean Dubreil