A Weird AI Camera With a Human Name Is Coming for Your Cell Phone

A camera named Alice — yes, Alice — is looking to change the way you shoot photos by marrying a large sensor, artificial intelligence, and your cell phone.

If it all sounds a little weird, that's because it is. Alice is a sort of "shell" of a camera made of aluminum and housing a 12-megapixel Micro Four Thirds sensor and lens mount. It has no viewfinder and no physical controls beyond a shutter button. Memory is built in, as shown in the preview video from Emily at Micro Four Nerds. The pre-production unit she is using sports 64 GB of internal memory and for some reason has a sealed-in 128 GB micro SD card as well. All of this comes at a price of $1,200 on the Alice Camera website.

My first thought upon laying eyes on the camera is: This looks ugly.

My second thought: Wait, this is finally someone adding AI features to a large sensor like I've been hoping Canon or Nikon would do for years.

There are some intriguing features here, for sure. By using the phone as a viewfinder, you can disconnect it from the camera entirely (it hooks up via Wi-Fi) and place it separately from the camera for vlogging use or just some creative camera angles. The AI manages to easily enhance photos or videos via a simple slider. Photos transfer instantly to your phone, though this is a double-edged sword, as I'll explain later. Somehow, the AI is even able to add split-prism focusing to vintage lenses. It's so, so promising.

That said, while the camera is still being produced and slated to ship in January 2024, I hope there are some very obvious (to photographers, at least) pitfalls that the company can address before this ends up in the hands of photographers.

The big one is the sealed-in memory. While it's great that it's easy to get photos onto the phone, don't make it harder to get things onto a computer. Photographers like to plug their cards into computers and just move stuff. Also, the workflow of photos going directly into the phone is also somewhat of a boondoggle for photographers, who tend to overshoot and have many reject photos in pursuit of the one. No one wants all those rejects hogging phone memory.

The other big one is the dependence on a phone and an app. As the owner of many an abandoned 360 camera and some older DSLR and mirrorless cameras that have been shelved from their native phone apps a long time ago, this is a terrible long-term strategy. I use digital cameras that are often a decade or two old, and they still work, even if their interface is a bit dated. I'm sure Lytro owners would like a word about what happens when a company goes belly up and leaves users with cameras that can't even perform their core functions.

Additionally, phone sizes and screens change all the time, and so, in time, many phones won't even fit the mount of the Alice Camera. The company should look into producing a module that can hook directly up to the camera that can add a screen and some manual controls so that users are not dependent on the screen for basic functions. Yes, it can be shot without the phone, but not in a truly usable way.

Truly, there's a lot of promise with this camera but also some potential peril.

Take a look at the preview above from Micro Four Nerds for more details and sample images. Do you think you'll pick one of these up? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.