The art of football – the eyes of a computer

This blog has devolved sufficiently so I can feel confident talking about something that’s not marketing but is absolutely 100% marketing-adjacent, namely AI-derived art.

A couple past blog posts presented AI-generated nicknames for baseball players and stadiums. Now, at the suggestion of my friend Steve, I’m taking it up a notch.

There’s a delightful time suck called DALL-E that uses what it’s able to suss out of the internet and run through its algorithmic meat-grinder to generate illustrations based on prompts.

After messing around with silly concepts like “a guitar made out of fried chicken,” I gave the program the prompt, “Green Bay Packers by Van Gogh.”

And the fun began.

DALL-E generates a series of nine images at a crack. Here’s how it responded to the prompt:

Gogh Pack Gogh indeed. I’m particularly enamored with the little Dutch cap with the backwards C, as well as the two players in the middle-left image running in a particularly mud-footed manner through what looks like a field of freshly threshed grain. If 18th-century European peasants ever scrimmaged on the back 40, this is definitely what they’d look like.

But we were just getting started. Toulouse-Lautrec meets the green-and-gold? You got it.

I am digging the neck-high tutu on the player in the top-middle image, and what looks to be MaxMcGee in a can-can line just below. I think we all can agree that had T-L lived in 1960s Ashwaubenon instead of 1890s Paris, the art world would be drastically different.

Going more traditional and asking DALL-E to mash up the Pack with a Renaissance master didn’t exactly work, as witnessed by Botticelli’s take on the idols of Cheeseheads everywhere.

Hmmm. More abstract than I would have thought, though I’d pay gladly travel the planet to see the middle-right Venus de Lambeau in the flesh.

Speaking of abstract, going way abstract was not the best idea, either. Jackson Pollock merely presented some takes on the Packers logo on appropriately squiggly backgrounds:

Piet Mondrian had even less of a clue, but what do you expect of someone whose only exposure to the pro game was the New York Giants of the 1940s?

Dali, on the other hand … well, no one can say Dali doesn’t get Central Division football.

There you have it: All the color, pageantry and drama of the Frozen Tundra, on little spider legs to boot!

I have many more that I’ll share in a future blog, but let me leave you with a piece of resistance: Here are your Green Bay Packers, as interpreted by Wisconsin native Georgia O’Keefe:

That’s O’Keefe for you – always looking to be provocative, but still true to the state of her birth.

Like I said, I’ll have more masterpieces in a future blog. In the meantime, if you have an Old Master you’d like run through the marvelous DALL-E machine, let me know!