This week's image is a paint-by-numbers kit nobody finished, which turned out to be the honest way to draw the issue. The filled regions are things we actually know. The outlined ones carry a number because somebody published a figure we cannot yet confirm. And three regions were specified to have no number printed in them at all, because that is where the hazard ratio would go, and what the dolphin is saying, and my patient's diagnosis.
The four renderings
Best numeral rendering by a wide margin. The lattice runs 1 through 70 in sequence and stays legible the whole way, and the region numbers carry on into the sixties across the rest of the canvas. It also worked out on its own that a kangaroo rat lives in a desert and gave it cactus and yucca, which I never asked for. Four pots filled against eight empty, matching the four-color palette exactly. All three unnumbered regions held.
The only one to get the physiology right and make it the visual center. The scale tilts toward the water pan, which is the entire seawater fact in one image. It also improved on the brief: I asked for a blank area above the seated figure and it gave me an empty thought balloon instead, which says the same thing better. Lattice numbers came out as generic single digits rather than the values I specified.
The only model that put a target numeral where it belonged, stamping 34 on the vial of mutations. It is also the most finished-looking and the most wrong. The scale tips toward the salt, which inverts the physiology, and it slipped a number into the tall blank rectangle, the one region every model was told to leave unnumbered. The paint pots migrated off the canvas and onto the easel tray.
The sparest and the most anxious. It fixated on 34 and 36 and stamped them across the entire circle cluster and into the crowd, so the number that was supposed to be singular became the only number in the picture. The palette drifted from deep teal to pale cyan. Worth keeping anyway for one accident: the bottle carries a blank label, which is the withheld-number idea turning up somewhere I never put it.
What each region stands for
| Region | Stands for | Instruction |
|---|---|---|
| Vial of 34 filaments | Mutations encoded into one patient's mRNA strand | Painted |
| Scale, salt against water | 35 grams of salt per liter of sea, 1.5 liters of urine to clear it | Painted |
| Lone sparkling water bottle | The nine ounces the machine waved through at Midway | Painted |
| Lattice of 70 spheres | Qubits, and the 22 canceled mRNA projects | Outlined, numbered |
| Crowd of figures | 1,137 patients in INTerpath-001 | Outlined, numbered |
| Stethoscope on a circuit board | The FDA asking whether a device can be tested like a clinician | Outlined, numbered |
| Blank rectangle at center | The hazard ratio Merck and Moderna did not publish | No number |
| Three empty speech balloons | What the dolphin, the crow, and the kangaroo rat are actually saying | No number |
| Space above the seated figure | A patient with several specialists and no unifying diagnosis | No number |
The prompt
An unfinished paint-by-numbers canvas on an easel, viewed straight on. The scene is a wide laboratory bench under a tall window. Roughly half the regions are filled with flat color and half remain white with thin black outlines and small printed numbers inside them. Painted in full color: a glass vial holding thirty-four fine suspended filaments; a brass balance scale with coarse salt in one pan and water in the other, tilted toward the water; a tall bottle of sparkling water standing alone at the right edge; a coupe glass of pale liquid with a mint sprig. Outlined but unpainted, each region showing a small number: a lattice of seventy small spheres strung on wire; a crowd of tiny identical figures; a stethoscope coiled around a circuit board; a low warehouse on the horizon through the window. Outlined but unpainted and containing no number at all: one large empty rectangle at the center of the bench where a chart would go; three empty speech balloons rising from a dolphin, a crow, and a small desert rat; a tall blank area above a single seated figure. Faint horizontal scanning lines pass across the whole canvas and stop just before the sparkling water bottle. A row of small paint pots sits along the bottom edge, several of them empty. Palette of oxblood, deep teal, brass gold, plum, and cream on white canvas. Flat mid-century illustration style, clean linework, no shading. No text other than the small region numbers.
One prompt, run without edits on ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and Perplexity, so the differences are the models rather than the wording. Numbers drawn from this week's issue: 34 mutations, 1,137 patients, 22 canceled projects, 70 qubits, 35 grams of salt, and one nine-ounce bottle that went through undetected. · The What Adam Is Reading archive