What Adam Is Reading · AI Art of the Week · 14 September 2026
One prompt, four models, and a sixteen-card lotería board built out of the week’s topics. Five of the fifteen named cards are real. Ten are invented. Nothing in any of these four pictures tells you which is which, which turned out to be the point.
Lotería is the Mexican game that hangs on the wall of every Mexican restaurant in America, and most people who have seen the cards a hundred times have never seen it played. It works like bingo with pictures instead of numbers. The deck runs to fifty-four cards, each one an image with a name and a number. Every player gets a tabla, a board of sixteen of those images in a four-by-four grid. A caller works through a shuffled deck, you cover your matches with dried pinto beans, and the first person to complete the agreed pattern shouts ¡Lotería! (or, in the older habit, ¡Buenas!).
The part worth knowing is the caller. He does not simply read the cards out. Each of the fifty-four has a verso attached to it, a rhymed couplet or proverb or riddle, and the caller performs it. El que le cantó a San Pedro no le volverá a cantar is EL GALLO, the rooster: the one that crowed for Saint Peter will not crow for him again. El farol de los enamorados, the lovers' lantern, is LA LUNA. A caller's reputation rests on wit and improvisation, and the register moves with the room, which is why the versions collected in different towns do not match. The canonical set was written down only in 2007, from a caller in Tamaulipas who had learned it from another caller.
The game reached New Spain from Italy by way of Spain in the eighteenth century, where it started as a colonial upper-class pastime. Soldiers in the independence war picked it up and carried it home, and it became a fairground fixture. The pictures nearly everyone recognizes are from the deck a French canning magnate named Clemente Jacques put into circulation in 1913.
ChatGPT
the aged board with the bowl of beans
The only flawless board. Sixteen cells in four rows of four, fifteen numbers in order, every caption spelled correctly with its accents intact, and the beans sitting on the cards where beans actually go.
It also solved a problem nobody set it. The cells are not uniformly inked. They are unevenly saturated the way a real chromolithograph is, the stock is foxed, and the corners are soft. Asked for a mid-century printed object, it produced a mid-century printed object rather than a clean drawing of one. The dog in the red sweater is the best single card in all four pictures, and the fly is drawn with considerably more care than the brief deserved.
Perplexity
the flat bright one
The cleanest execution and the flattest surface, closest of the four to a poster and furthest from a printed card. Sixteen cells, correct numbering, correct captions, and a magenta face-down card that is the prettiest object in the set.
One miss, and it is a specific one. The beans are arranged around the border of the board rather than on the cards. Nobody plays that way. The brief called them "game markers" and this is the only model of the four that read them as decoration instead, which is a small failure of understanding what the objects in a picture are for rather than what they look like.
Grok
the pale one
Two substitutions here are worth the whole exercise.
The brief said LA MALETA should be a stacked pair of cardboard boxes. This one drew suitcases, because maleta means suitcase. The brief said EL SABIO should be a figure at a desk under a lamp. This one drew a robed man in a turban, because sabio means sage. Both times it read the caption and drew the word, rather than drawing the picture the brief spent a clause describing.
It is also the only one that rendered EL CORAZÓN as an anatomical heart instead of a valentine, which for this newsletter is the right answer by accident. Palette is the washiest of the four, a modern reprint on uncoated stock rather than a 1913 litho.
Gemini
the one photographed at an angle
The most convincing photograph, and the only one that is not a lotería board. It built six columns instead of four, which gave it eighteen cells and two more than it had cards for. It closed the gap by drawing EL AVIÓN twice and inventing EL CARITA, a shower head buried under beans, captioned with a word that means "little face" and has nothing to do with anything.
The numbering gave up entirely. 16 appears three times, 12 and 3 and 4 twice each, and the sequence runs 1, 2, 3, 4, 15, 16 before losing interest. And then, having failed to count to sixteen, it drew by far the best kidney of the four: a proper pair with the aorta and the vena cava between them, red and blue, correctly placed. The one that could not count could do anatomy.
A Mexican lotería tabla: a four-by-four grid of sixteen numbered picture cards printed on a single sheet of cream card stock, in the flat saturated chromolithograph style of a mid-century Mexican lotería deck. Bold black outline, unmodelled color, no shading, no perspective. Each cell has a thin colored border, a numeral in the upper corner, and a caption band across the bottom in red hand-lettered capitals. The sixteen cards, left to right, top to bottom: EL RIÑÓN, a pair of kidneys · EL CERDO, a pink pig in profile · EL MURCIÉLAGO, a bat with spread wings · LA MOSCA, a housefly with veined wings · EL AVIÓN, an airliner seen from below · LA REGADERA, a shower head with three falling drops · EL PERRITO, a small dog wearing a tiny shirt · EL CORAZÓN, a red heart with the numerals 100 on it · LA MANO, an open hand · EL OJO, a single eye · LA MALETA, a stacked pair of cardboard boxes · EL SABIO, a figure at a desk under a lamp · LA BOTELLA, a green bottle · EL SOL, a sun with a face · LA LUNA, a crescent moon with a face · and one card in the lower right that is FACE DOWN, showing only the red patterned back of the card, with no picture, no number and no caption. Scattered across the sheet, a handful of dried pinto beans sitting on some of the cards as game markers, casting small shadows. The sheet is slightly worn at the corners, laid on a dark wooden table. Palette: cerise red, chrome yellow, grass green, cobalt, black outline, cream stock. Negative: no photorealism, no gradients, no soft focus, no modern flat vector illustration, no drop shadows on the artwork itself, no English text, no faces on the human cards beyond simple outlined features.