Notre Dame Football: An Immersive and Horrifying “DALL-E Mini” Art Experience

The college football off-season is a weird, boring, desperate time for most of us.

Sure, there’s recruiting news and plenty of speculation to be done on how the upcoming season will play out for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football program, but overall, the time from February to September is a bleak, desolate landscape lacking the buzz, inspiration, and cultural significance that each active college football season brings into our lives.

With that said, technology is ever-improving these days, and a couple weeks ago, a new capability went viral on Twitter — DALL-E mini, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine that takes a user-inputted phrase and generates 9 images for it, as best it can. It’s pretty amazing when you really think about it.

Like any new technology, though, DALL-E mini has its quirks, shortcomings, and limitations. For instance, the tool has a lot of trouble generating human faces — creating horrifying and haunting portraits that largely look like Ralph from Scary Movie 3.

Furthermore, the website itself throws you an error about 50% of the time you attempt to run a new query, giving you a message that sounds like what you’d tell someone who suggests it will be quick to drive back into Chicago from out of town at ~2 pm on a Sunday in the summer.

Still, with the right queries and some patience, you can really get some moving, artistic, and thought-provoking works of art from DALL-E mini.

And as more and more folks began tweeting out their cursed creations, my good friend Keith gave me the divinely inspired idea to use DALL-E mini to create some truly stirring and original Notre Dame sports content.

So, I took Keith’s suggestion and ran with it (a week later than I promised, thanks to a trade show I had to attend last week for my day job), and have spent the better part of Monday afternoon/evening compiling what I believe is truly the most impressive collection of AI-generated, Notre Dame football-themed art in the entire country, if not the world/universe.

So, because a picture is worth 1,000 words and each of the below pictures has 9 separate pictures inside it (meaning each of the below images is worth AT LEAST 9,000 words), let us not dilly-dally any longer.

It’s time to enter “Notre Dame Football: An Immersive and Horrifying Art Experience.” Prepare to be moved, excited, and ultimately horrified by my ideas that a computer brought to life in some of the weirdest and most upsetting ways.

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The “Coaches of Notre Dame Past” Exhibit

Charlie Weis Eating Cheeseburgers (2005)

Ara Was Yoked (1966)

Bob’s Hair is the Paint, Clark’s Head is the Canvas (2012/2018)

The Best Crooner Named Frank (1943)

Lou Holtz Winning Wrestlemania (1988)

Brian Kelly Eating Too-Spicy Gumbo (2022)

Bob Davie: An Official Portrait (1999)

Tyrone Willingham, Unfiltered (2004)

Clark Lea with Luscious Locks (year unknown)

How Much You Wanna Bet Brian VanGorder Can Throw a Football Over Them Mountains? (2014)

The Hall of Ridiculing Opponents’ Coaches

I YABBA DABBA DOn’t Need a Headset to Remember the Six (2014)

BYOA (Bring Your Own Angst) (2020)

Nicky Nick and the Funky Bunch (2013)

I Need Strong Bones to Carry Around These Khakis...and All These Losses to Ohio State (2018)

Good Soup. (2021)

Open Your Mouth and Remove All Doubt (2015-Present)

Can I Spend the Night Tonight...AND FOR TWO WEEKS STRAIGHT?!? (2016)

Ryan Day Crying After Losing to Notre Dame (2022)

Beat SC: A Story of Good vs. Evil

Zibby Tossing Punt Return Haymakers (2005)

Adoree Jackson Is The Fastest Man in College Football (Because Will Fuller is Legally Considered a Cheetah) (2015)

Clay Helton, ND Fans’ Favorite Coach (2017)

May the Bush Push Burn in Hell (2005)

Pete Carroll Eats Babies (2009)

4 for 40: An RKG Experience

Bradywatch (2006)

SuperHam (2021)

Tuitt and Olmec: Kindred Spirits (2013)

The Brothers Martin (2013)

Bo Bauer, Bo Bauer, Let Down Your Hair! (2022)

4 MORE YEARS!!! (2022)

Bellyman: King of the Ring (2020)

Pun, Incarnate (2020)

...AND TWIIIIIINS!!! (2009)

The Ultimate Showdown (2017)

You Wouldn’t Like Him When He’s Angry and Pulling on a Sweep (2017)

Storied Past, Bright Future: The Faces of Notre Dame Football in 2022

It’s Mr. Steal Yo Girl (2022)

HARRY (2022)

The New Defensive Mastermind (2022)

Tom Drinks Hamm’s. (2022)

Miscellaneous: The Random ND-Related DALL-E Mini Queries of a Weirdo With Free Time on a Monday Night

The Last One to Be Carried Off the Field, The Only One to Carry Frodo (1993)

Bring Back Clashmore Mike (2022)

You Better Move, You Better Dance (2013)

Mr. 305 (Wins He Will Amass as Head Coach) (2022)

An Ode to Brendan’s Masterpiece (2021)

The GOAT (2022)

Big Meaty Claws (2001)

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Alright folks, that’s where I’m going to stop — not because I was out of ideas (because clearly, as I dove into Spongebob and Lord of the Rings references, I was just scraping the surface of the weird recesses of my brain), but because I need to go to bed soon.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve finished my work here — nay, an artist’s work is never done and a true artist is never satisfied. As long as this image generator is still up and running, I vow to continue to work it into as many articles as it makes sense to, including my weekly W.I.N. presentations once we get into the fall. There’s so much more we can do with this bad boy.

For now, though, please sound off in the comments with your own DALL-E Mini creations — what do you want to see that you weren’t able to see in the above museum of beautiful ND Football AI-generated art, and what monstrosity or crime against nature did the AI spit out when you tried to get it to create it for you???

Can’t wait to peruse the comments and enjoy all the best that that haunting machine has to offer us before it becomes sentient and begins its more important work: enslaving the human race!!!

Go Pitbull, and Go Irish!