This AI Brought 11 of My Worst 'Seinfeld' Nightmares to Life

To get the hang of using the DALL-E Mini, I wanted to try merging iconic stars from the 90's sitcom with iconic works of American art. Seinfeld might seem like a weird choice, but think about it: like any red-blooded, nostalgia-hungry millennial, I’m intimately familiar with the overall aesthetic of Jerry, Kramer, Elaine and Pals. You probably are, too. That means whenever this tool coughs up its rendition of these iconic characters, you’ll know, right off the bat, how accurate or deeply deeply wrong those renditions are.

Case in point: if you’re familiar with the show, the name “Newman” instantly conjures up images of an antagonistic fleshy weirdo in aviator-style glasses. The early drawings of famed Latvian-American painter Mark Rothko were dominated by similarly lumpy, fleshy figures before the artist moved onto Big Ol Blocks O Color, so I figured I’d throw these two names into the DALL-E and see what came out. All things considered, I’d say it did a pretty good job!

Writing about the polarizing work of Francis Bacon in for the New Yorker in 2009, art critic Peter Schjeldahl noted that the artists’ entire career was based on work that “mobilized an emotion of energetic, strangely energizing despair.” Given that the guy was most known for vividly disturbing paintings of screaming priests and mutilated nudes, I was curious what it might look like if Bacon turned his attention to noted standup comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

And I wish I could tell you, but the results just... don’t look like the guy. They certainly look like something Bacon himself would conjure up—they all have the warped facial features faces and mostly-muted palette that are a hallmark of his work. They definitely look unsettling enough, but they just aren’t Jerry, at least to this particular Seinfeld-fan.

Satisfied that DALL-E could spit out works that both kinda did and totally did not portray the lovable stars of the hit 90's sitcom, I wanted to get a bit weird with it. How far could I tell this machine to stretch a picture of Elaine, or Kramer, or Jerry, before it started looking like someone else?

If Tentacle George is any indication, the answer is pretty damn far. Somehow, in the ceramic figurines that DALL-E produced here, it managed to catch the shapes that make George look like George (at least from the waist up). Tentacle George has tentacles, yeah, but it also has the character’s rapidly receding hairline and famed drip. Even though it doesn’t have much of a face, there’s still the suggestion that Tentacle George wears glasses. All he needs is an iconic answering machine message and some awkward romantic flings and he’d be a dead ringer for the OG Costanza.

Quick disclaimer—though it depends on the contents, it’s safe to say that drinking the contents of a lava lamp probably won’t kill you. You will definitely have a bad time though, which is what I’m assuming Elaine is experiencing here. I’m certainly having a bad time looking at her. She might also be having a bad time because DALL-E took my request for a Rembrandt-style painting as an invitation to turn her into one of the pilgrims that the artist was so fond of painting. It’s one thing to be subjected to an AI-generated reality where you’re forced to reckon with the gastrointestinal consequences of your beverage choices; it’s another to wear starchy, heavy, hella unflattering pilgrim garb at the same time.

Right off the bat, DALL-E Mini’s results aren’t giving me vibes from the abstract artist Willem de Kooning—save for the one result that popped him in what looks like a literal gallery of de Kooning’s work. What they are giving me is slime, and Kramer, and one picture of Kramer sinking in slime, so I’m going to consider this a win.

I mean, it’s also giving me one picture of him seemingly without a head. And a bunch of him without eyes. Let’s call this a win. A soft win. Maybe not a win.

This request, unlike its fellows, is an utter disappointment. I wanted Jerry Seinfeld immortalized in a squishy balloon form, and got... well, I’m not sure what I got. They’re ostensibly balloons, but I’m not sure if we could call them “animals.” They vaguely resemble the shiny dogs of Jeff Koons. There are limbs going nowhere, growths without beginning or end, and heads that just aren’t heads.

This one gets most of it right: there’s a Kramer-esque figure in the foreground, a Walmart-esque setting in the background, and somewhat(?) Dali-ish technicolor hues decorating some of the results. Perhaps an AI’s art style is already Dali-esque without the qualifier in my request. But why is Kramer in a trench coat in most of these? Why does his entire face look like it’s melting now? What’s up with his meaty hands? Are those hands? How is his hair still immaculate in spite of all this? Questions aside, I hope he finds whatever groceries his little Kramer heart desires.

I’m gonna give DALL-E the benefit of the doubt here. These images might look nothing like the chaotic, splattered paintings from Jackson Pollock, but it would have been tough for anyone to recreate Jerry’s upper west side pad in that style. Instead, it looks like the AI chose to forego that request and spit out a pretty basic reimagining of the Seinfeld HQ. There’s a bit of the diffuse light and color of Georges Seurat’s Pointillism there. Then again, “pretty basic” by artificial intelligence standards means that each result kind of looks like a living room hang sesh that’s been dredged up from some infernal depths that nobody was ever meant to witness.

I may never stop being impressed by the DALL-E Mini’s ability to somehow conjure “Costanza” via some image that’s barely recognizable as human. I’m also glad that in a few results, DALL-E took pity on the guy and seemingly gave him his own dental practice instead of putting him in the dreaded dentists’ chair.

This one’s just another disappointment. I’m getting hella Bosch vibes from these results—each work has the same kind of lush, manic energy you’d get from works like The Garden of Earthly Delights. But without Elaine or Satan (or anything Elaine or Satan-adjacent), it looks like DALL-E decided to lean hard on the art-inspo while foregoing everything else I’d asked for. Sad face.

For this one, I nixed the art-inspo because I really just wanted to see how DALL-E would interpret something finite. Telling the algo to dream up something like a fake Seinfeld stand-up set is one thing—hell, there’s plenty for the machine to get trained on—but a “final” set implies something else.

DALL-E seems to understand that, and outfitted Jerry accordingly. His hair is thinning and gray now, and he’s wearing a suit that’s magnitudes more formal than the cheese that he’d sport during his standup sets on the show. The same way that DALL-E did its best to cobble together something couch-like in response to my request for a living room, it’s doing its best to cobble something together resembling a comedy legends’ last moments onstage—and at the very least, he’s smiling.

Update: March 10, 2023: Nothing, Forever is an infinite Twitch stream of an artificial intelligence’s idea of Seinfeld. It’s quite bizarre and fun! The jokes are nonsensical but still approximately real in that uncanny AI way, just like these drawings. The stream was banned from Twitch after veering into weird territory with jokes about cancel culture, comedy, and transphobia, but Nothing, Forever returned in March 2023. We’ll see how long it runs this time. Maybe as long as the original? We’ve included a few gifs to give you the flavor of it.