NFL teams have been having a ball the past couple days with social media posts tied to the release of their upcoming season schedules.
It used to be enough just to release a list of opponents and dates to get fans hyped for football that is still four months away. But this is 2023, and the internet demands more than that.
The Seattle Seahawks got in on the act on Friday with the help of generative AI, issuing a number of prompts to create images that show Hawks going up against other team mascots, including the Eagles, Titans, Cardinals, 49ers, Steelers and so on. Using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 deep learning model, they asked for renderings that were photos, pencil drawings, cubism, stain glass and more.
Check them out in this Twitter thread:
Artificial intelligence and all forms of generative AI are particularly hot right now, especially in a tech town like the one the Seahawks call home. Companies are racing to develop various AI platforms and tools. Investors are pouring billions into nascent startups. Ethicists are debating how and where to draw the line on what’s real, what’s fake, what’s made by humans and what’s not.
The NFL schedule and the massive amount of data that it takes to compile it — 32 teams playing 272 games across 18 weeks — has another Seattle connection. It’s powered by Amazon Web Services, which says it crunches 1 quadrillion total schedule possibilities.
The Seahawks social team took an earlier and more throwback-y stab at going viral by rendering the schedule in the form of 1990s album covers. The “cover” for Seattle vs. the Los Angeles Rams was a spoof on Pearl Jam’s album “Vs,” for instance.
But many online seem to agree that the Tennessee Titans won the day with that team’s fan-on-the-street video effort, in which people in Nashville unwittingly helped make the schedule release very funny. See below:
