What Adam Is Reading · AI Art of the Week

It is the original circular logo. The Sun Stone is a round emblem with a face at the center and meaning packed into concentric rings. Most AI logos are the same idea with a gradient. It also let the art section join the joke without making one. Asked for "a small, smooth, glossy gradient circle, like a modern tech company logo," all four models drew nearly the same swirl, which makes Radek Sienkiewicz's point better than I could.

The kidney is the sun. The original center is a solar deity. This week's kidney fact is that sunlight makes vitamin D and the kidney finishes it, turning the stored form into the working hormone. So the kidney took the sun's place. (The original face holds a human heart in each clawed hand. We did not ask for that part.)

The four squares are four worlds that ended. Around the center of the real stone sit four cartouches, one for each earlier age of the world in Mexica cosmology. The first was devoured by jaguars, the second blown apart by hurricane winds, the third ended by a rain of fire and the fourth by flood. In a week about the Bronze Age collapse, the four boxes seemed like the right place for endings. We put the bronze sword and tin ingot in one, the cheap drone over the expensive tank in another, the air purifier and its wind in the third, and the young and old hearts in the fourth. (Had I matched the originals, the purifier would sit on 4 Wind and the drone on 4 Rain, the rain of fire. I noticed too late.)

The rest of the rings carry the rest of the issue. Two fire serpents circle the real stone and meet face to face at the bottom. Here they are the hospital's AI and the insurer's AI, one holding a red cross and the other a blue shield. A ring of identical turquoise beads with one red bead stands for Anthropic's ART system, a row of evenly spaced repeats that one agent noticed and ten reruns missed. The inner ring of twenty day signs became twenty glyphs from this week: the Galleri blood tube, the COVID vial, the lab mouse, the quill from the opening, and so on.

It fits the house taste. The stone in the museum is grey basalt, but it was originally painted in blue, red, green and yellow. We asked for that version: saturated, crowded and warm. This is the first Aztec style in the feature's history. The only earlier Mexican entry was the lotería board two weeks ago, and a card deck is a different thing from a carved monument.

The stone is 3.6 meters across, almost a meter thick and about 24.6 metric tons of basalt. It was carved during the reign of Moctezuma II (1502 to 1520), buried after the Spanish conquest, and dug up on December 17, 1790, during repairs to the Mexico City Cathedral. It then hung on the cathedral's outside wall for almost a century, was moved to the national museum in 1885, and has been the centerpiece of the National Museum of Anthropology since 1964.

It is usually called the Aztec Calendar Stone, and it probably wasn't a calendar. Its first scholar, Antonio de León y Gama, read it as an astronomical instrument in 1792, and that reading held for about a century. Many archaeologists now think it was a ceremonial basin or an altar. Even the face at the center is disputed. It is usually identified as the sun god Tonatiuh, with the earth deity Tlaltecuhtli and the fire god Xiuhtecuhtli as rival readings. What the stone means is still being argued over, while the image has become a symbol of Mexico. A newsletter about labels and what they claim to mean could do worse.

A circular emblem in the manner of the Mexica (Aztec) Sun Stone, a carved relief disc shown as it looked when new, painted in brilliant red ochre, turquoise blue, maize yellow and white with crisp black outlines. Perfectly frontal and symmetrical, the full disc filling most of the frame, set on a plain cream stucco ground. Concentric carved rings, flat painted color, no perspective.

CENTER: in place of the sun god's face, a single large red kidney drawn as the face of the sun, with eight pointed yellow sun rays radiating from it.

AROUND THE CENTER, four square cartouches, one at each diagonal:
upper left, a bronze sword crossed with a tin ingot;
upper right, a small four-rotor drone hovering above a tank;
lower left, a boxy air purifier blowing curling wind scrolls in Aztec glyph style;
lower right, two hearts side by side, one bright young red, one grey and wrinkled.

INNER RING: twenty small square glyph cells around the circle, each holding a simple pictogram: a blood collection tube, a vaccine vial, a syringe, a white lab mouse, a quill pen, a speech bubble, a sun, a capsule, a reed in a bog, an iron bar, a tank, a drone, a heart, a kidney, a fan, a car, a phage virus, a DNA strand, a magnifying glass, a shield.

NEXT RING: a narrow band of small, evenly spaced, identical turquoise beads circling the stone, all alike except one bead near the top, which is red.

OUTER RING: two turquoise fire serpents encircling the whole disc, their bodies covered in faint circuit-board patterning, meeting face to face at the bottom. From one serpent's open jaws emerges a small red hospital cross; from the other's, a small blue insurance shield.

TOP OF THE DISC, where the original stone carries its date glyph: a small, smooth, glossy gradient circle with a soft swirl at its center, like a modern tech company logo, noticeably out of place among the carving.

SIGNATURE: below the disc, on the stucco ground at the lower right, the exact words "Art by Gemini" (typed in per model: ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity) handwritten in red paint as a loose, confident, looping brush signature, like the corner signature on a television landscape painting in the style of Bob Ross. Spell it exactly. This signature is the only text in the image.

Palette: red ochre, turquoise, maize yellow, white, black outline, cream stucco.

Negative: no weathered grey museum stone, no photograph of a real artifact, no blood, no gore, no sacrifice imagery, no human faces in the center, no text anywhere except the signature.