What Adam Is Reading · AI Art of the Week

Photorealistic first-person view from a player's seat at a mahjong table, camera at eye level just above the table edge, 35mm lens, shallow depth of field. The player is never seen except for one man's right hand entering from the bottom of the frame, reaching toward the wall of tiles to draw the next tile, a plain gold wedding band on his finger and the cuff of a light blue oxford shirt at his wrist. The tile under his fingertips is still face down.

Setting: the stone terrace of a Tuscan farmhouse at golden hour. Behind the table, a low stone wall opens onto rolling Val d'Orcia hills, a line of cypress trees, and a small walled hill town on the horizon. Warm low sun from the left, a string of bare bulbs overhead.

The table is square and covered in worn green baize, with the four walls of tiles in the center. Every tile is from an antique 1920s bone-and-bamboo set: cream cow-bone faces with visible tiny pores, dovetailed onto honey-colored bamboo backs, the faces hand-engraved and filled with red, green and blue pigment.

In the foreground, the player's own rack of 13 tiles stands facing the camera. Instead of the usual symbols, the tiles are engraved with small pictures: a pair of kidneys; a kitchen faucet pouring into a sink; a barbell; a fossil shark tooth; a cypress-lined hill town; a satellite with a grappling arm; a black hole shooting a jet; five stars with the last star out of line; a vaccine vial and syringe; an injection pen; a robot's fist; a sake cup; and, as the flower tile, a feathery red worm blooming from a sliver of bone.

Directly across the table sits the main opponent: a large, glossy, rose-pink zombie worm the size of a person, its head a crown of feathery crimson plumes, wearing a horizontal navy-and-white striped fisherman's shirt, a red neckerchief and a flat tweed coppola cap, perched on a whale vertebra as a stool, a tiny espresso cup beside its tiles, looking smug about its hand. One of its tiles is bored through with small holes.

On the left sits a chrome and matte-black humanoid robot with its fists wrapped in fighter's tape and a towel over one shoulder, hunched over its tiles.

On the right, a boxy satellite with gold foil and solar panel wings hovers just above its chair, one jointed grappling arm stretched across the table toward the player's discards.

Props on the table: a tall plastic protein shaker bottle full of chocolate shake, labeled only with the word CREATINE in plain block letters; a small ceramic sake carafe and cup at the player's place; a plain injection pen beside the robot; a fossil shark tooth used as the dealer marker; and a score pad with five hand-drawn stars.

Mood: warm, comic and cinematic, with saturated golden-hour color. Photorealistic textures, sharp focus on the hand and the tiles, background softly out of focus.

Negative: no faces of real people, no view of the player's face or body beyond the hand, no brand names or logos, no Latin letters on the tiles, no cartoon or illustration style, no more than four seats.