Dacoco, the founding force behind Alien Worlds Web3 universe, has unveiled Lynx AI, a Discord-accessible large language model that allows users to generate their own stories and content.
The users in the Alien Worlds universe can tap into the foundational lore penned by renowned sci-fi author Kevin J. Anderson who is known for his work on Dune, Star Wars and other classic sci-fi stories. This is an essential step forward for Tokenized Lore: enabling a community to control the canon of an original transmedia intellectual property.
“The advent of generative AI tools will make content creation easier than ever and enforcing IPs that we have enjoyed for decades will become even more difficult as a deluge of community-generated content takes over,” said Saro McKenna, CEO of Dacoco, in a statement. “We believe Lynx and Tokenized Lore prepare Alien Worlds for this change and position it as the media model of the future.”
This lore is interesting, as I’ll get into Anderson’s contribution to the Alien Worlds project in a bit. They hired him to come in, fix the lore, create a foundation for further creation, which community members armed with AI can further create. And then the community can vote on what community creations can become canon. It’s not unlike the LLM-based AI created for The Wheel of Time franchise.
“Kevin Rose was looking for was someone who could basically create, someone who was a world builder. And that’s what Kevin J. Anderson is. He’s he can take pre-existing franchises like Star Wars, and Dune, and then use the elements that are contained within that to be faithful to whatever exists already. But then, he’s very prolific. And he became the world builder,” said McKenna, in an interview with GamesBeat.
“Kevin Anderson has come in, he’s built this foundational lore treatment. But the idea is that the community will taken architecture and build with it,” she said. “We like to describe ourselves as the initiators of the Alien Worlds metaverse, and we’re still one of the main contributors to it. And we’re just a company.”
Already available in the official Alien Worlds Discord and in over 30 community discord channels that give access to hundreds of thousands of users, Lynx is an expert on the ever-expanding Alien Worlds fictional universe.
Not only can it be queried as a virtual librarian on the existing lore, but the “Theorize” feature leverages the adaptive capabilities of the LLM (Large Language Model), giving Lynx the freedom to generate novel story ideas and enabling players to explore imaginative new scenarios that can result in a richer and more dynamic experience.
To help spur original creations, Galactic Hubs, the Alien Worlds grant program, is providing grants that reward players for their creativity. Recently, Galactic Hubs launched a USD 50,000 grant for game developers to build games based on lore generated by players within the Alien Worlds Metaverse.
With Tokenized Lore voting mechanisms increasingly activated in the future, the Alien Worlds community will have the opportunity to vote on these stories thus enabling users to directly play their part in shaping its core mythology.
“Through tools like Lynx AI and initiatives like the Galactic Hubs Grant Program, Alien Worlds is not only maintaining its status as a leader in Web 3.0 gaming but is also pioneering new ways for the community to engage more deeply and meaningfully with the game’s evolving narrative landscape,” said McKenna.
Alien Worlds is a pioneering metaverse ecosystem, ranking as one of the world’s premier blockchain games. Players delve into a universe of unique digital assets (NFTs), embark on interstellar missions, partake in planetary elections, and strategize in planetary councils. Six Planet DAOs vie for dominance, fostering collaboration, competition, and strategy among users.
With a staggering player base of nearly eight million and an active monthly user count exceeding 300,000, Alien Worlds tops DappRadar activity/usage charts, inspiring players to push the boundaries of creativity in the metaverse.
Established in 2018 in Zug, Switzerland’s Crypto Valley, Dacoco emerged as a solution to real-world challenges faced by on-chain DAOs. With years of hands-on experience, Dacoco boasts some of the industry’s most robust DAO code and methodologies.
All of this is getting fascinating as Dacoco teamed up in November with revered science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson (Star Wars, Dune, Saga of the Seven Suns). Together, they introduce AI-Driven Tokenized Story-Telling, also known as the “Large Lore Model,” a pioneering concept that merges the power of AI with the vibrant creativity of the global community, all governed through decentralized on-chain mechanisms.
With over 9 billion plays in Alien Worlds, this feature will be the largest AI system governed by DAOs at scale.
This revolutionary storytelling approach is designed to augment and scale the new and rich lore created by the co-author of the Dune Prequel series through community contributions worldwide. Through advanced AI tools, the decentralized community can leverage this strong lore foundation to build collaborative Alien Worlds games, media, and more.
With Kevin J. Anderson’s masterful storytelling as our foundation, the community has a dual opportunity – they can appreciate and integrate the literary contributions of giants like Anderson, who wrote fan favorites like Star Wars: Young Jedi Knights, and simultaneously harness the formidable power of AI, along with the imaginative contributions of participants across the globe, McKenna said.
The next great franchise will be built by a community, not a corporation. When launched, our AI-driven ‘Large Lore Model’ will only be trained on community-approved lore, whether in games, art, video, or other media. Dacoco’s battle-tested DAO technology will serve as the foundation to support the community as it embarks on this journey. Over time, we will see a community entirely responsible for maintaining the canon of the Alien Worlds metaverse.
This initiative is the first step in evaluating the need for decentralized governance systems to oversee AI systems, an important topic of debate as AI becomes more integrated into people’s everyday lives. Dacoco’s goal is to ensure AI systems remain accountable, auditable, and true to their intended purpose.
In today’s interconnected world, storytelling has the power to unite global communities. AI tools can act as the essential bridge that ensures we are weaving a consistent and cohesive universe without requiring direct collaboration between every member of that community. As we meld the time-honored craft of storytelling with the innovative capabilities of AI, we’re not just telling stories; we’re creating universes.
Kevin J. Anderson, a luminary in the science-fiction domain with over 24 million books in print, boasts iconic works, including the expanded Dune series, Saga of Seven Suns, and adaptations for franchises like Star Wars and The X-Files.
Kevin J. Anderson and his role in Alien Worlds
Anderson has written dozens of national bestsellers and has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the SFX Readers’ Choice Award. has published more than 175 books, 58 of which have been national or international bestsellers. He has written numerous novels in the Star Wars, X-Files, and Dune universes, as well as a unique steampunk fantasy trilogy beginning with Clockwork Angels, written with legendary rock drummer Neil Peart. His original works include the Saga of Seven Suns series, the Wake the Dragon and Terra Incognita fantasy trilogies, the Saga of Shadows trilogy, and his humorous horror series featuring Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.
I interviewed Anderson and Dacoco’s Kevin Rose, head of marketing, a while back and was astounded at much Anderson has written. People joke about whether he has used tech to clone himself. He’s a wee bit more prolific than I am, though I got two books out myself. I said I was a fanboy of the Dune novels he co-wrote with Brian Herbert, son of Dune author Frank Herbert. To write so many books, I asked him if he had learned about AI tech before everyone else.
He said, “I’m one of these people that I really do love to write. I mean, anything else is measured in units of time. It takes me away from writing. If I’m cooking, or if I’m doing family stuff, or if I’m traveling, it’s all those hours that could be used for writing.”
He also described himself as the biggest Dune fanboy in the world and he got to work with Frank Herbert’s son for 26 or so years, going through his boxes of notes and letters. He said he felt like an archaeologist looking through the Dead Sea Scrolls.
He said he had an emotional reaction when he saw one of Herbert’s genius sentences, “Damn the spice, save the men.” It was written on a small piece of paper, as if Herbert had scrawled it in the middle of the night after waking up. It refers to a key scene about the character of Duke Leto Atreides in Dune. About 10 of the Duke’s men were about to be eaten by a giant sandworm. Leto was flying above them in a thopter (dragonfly-like flying machine). Instead of saving the valuable spice harvester and the invaluable spice within it, Leto ordered the thopters to save the men instead. That simple line showed what kind of man the duke was. Kevin Rose, who is part of Dacoco, choked up as Anderson retold that story.
Now if there’s anybody you want to hire to write the lore for something that could be an endless game, then Anderson is your man, and Rose is the guy you want to be the sounding board for it.
“I’m getting emotional. So I’m also a big fan of just sci fi in general. I don’t I don’t really consume any other type of media besides sci fi or fantasy,” Rose said. “I grew up playing Magic: The Gathering. I’m doing Dungeons & Dragons now. The Witcher series, the Dune series I’m reading. I’m reading Princess of Dune.”
Rose decided to work with Anderson as he began thinking about things like the metaverse, Dacoco’s game Alien Worlds.
“I reached out to Kevin. It was specifically Kevin I wanted because when I was sitting there thinking about what we wanted to do, which was to reinvigorate the fun, the foundational lore of the Alien Worlds metaverse, he could be so important,” Rose said.
“He created his own worlds, and has been recognized for the vastness and depth of them, like The Saga of Seven Suns series. He was also able to move into worlds he didn’t necessarily create and improve upon them or expand upon them,” Rose added. “He could improve them. It was a perfect fit. I wrote him an email and said, ‘My name is Kevin Rose. Got a crazy idea.’”
A couple of months later after lots of phone conversations, they got together with a concept artist and Anderson went to work and wrote and came back with ideas that were months in the making.
“This was the starting point of all kinds of stuff. Yes, I’ve written my own universes where you make up everything from scratch, and it all has to make sense,” Anderson said. “And that’s kind of my superpower, to create worlds that are consistent, that have religion and history and cultures and science. There’s so many things that have to fit together to make a world believable. But also, I’ve done so much work in other people’s universes, and I hope I’ve left them undamaged like the Dune universe.”
Anderson said he looked at the lore for Alien Worlds and saw there were some holes and it had not been developed with close attention to consistency. He decided to tackle the project and “create a sandbox for other people to play in.”
In creating Alien Worlds, he found it was not just creating a sandbox.
“It was like creating Disneyland,” Anderson said. “It was huge, immersive stuff for up to eight million players if you put them all together. I brainstormed with Kevin (Rose). We got a lot of inspiration from the concept artists. And we created some really cool stuff. We’re creating the universe in the first place and everybody gets to do other cool things with it. It’s a very democratic system where everybody has a little stake in the universe. This is something where they all helped, like a hive mind.””
In other words, it’s Kevin J. Anderson’s world, and we’re just playing in it.
“Kevin (Anderson) is the godfather of the metaverse (around Alien Worlds,” Rose said. “Kevin said ‘Let there be light,’ and then he established the laws of the universe and the the physics, the cultures. What are the rules? And we present those rules and we’re doing it now to the community. And then they go, ‘Oh, I wanted to make a game. I want to do art. I want to write a story. I want to do animation. And now they can they can draw from these rules and be consistent with one another without ever talking to each other and then work through decentralized systems to canonize that and commercialize it for their own benefit.
Rose said he thinks Alien Worlds is one of the only universes where there are live decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which are self-governing blockchain organizations where those who vote are the ones who own the tokens issued by the originating group. In this case, it’s the Trillium token. (In the lore, Trillium is the most bio-reactive material in the universe. When it comes into contact with raw genetic material — like humans — catastrophic things can happen. It can lead to good things as well, but it only exists on six planets — corresponding to Alien Worlds’ six DAOs).
“The owners of the token decide,” Rose said. “It’s like our version of the spice in Dune — the thing around which everything else revolves. We went to our six planetary DAOs and said we have dreams of reinvigorating the lore and creating a unifying foundation for all the creators within the metaverse to use and create consistently with one another. They unanimously voted yes. It was a DAO-led vote.”
So they redid the lore and got imaginative. And players started helping, and Rose and Anderson and their organization were responsible for canonizing everything.
“Why is this thing scarce? Why is it important in this metaverse? We will have a vote on that,” Rose said. “I’ve already received DMS from people in the community saying hey, ‘I’ve got this idea for a story.’ Hell yeah.”
So Anderson kept writing and dropped these stories about the universe that the fans could run with.
“The fun part for me is just making up all this great stuff. Whatever platform works, and this this is a whole new, innovative platform to me, and I see the potential in it. It’s something that not everybody is doing,” Anderson said.
Anderson said he has worked as a consulting on a half-dozen or so games, but none like this project. In truth, this universe had fatal flaws in it, Anderson came in to fix it and change things, and he started the canon anew without any straitjackets. The fans rolled with it. They had already been creating things as the Alien Worlds game had existed for a while. But now there was somebody to tie the lore together.
“I’ve always wanted to do this. It was so much freedom,” Anderson said. “The alien races and cultures give me chills. They started out very cliched and stereotypical. And I took that as a challenge.”
There are crazy ideas like getting a DAO to write a novel set within Alien Worlds
Much of Anderson’s work was done in 14 months, and “it felt like two years,” Anderson said. And now Alien Worlds is a decentralized sci-fi franchise where the tokens are worth a lot of money. It’s been set up with a foundation that will give it a shot at being a franchise. If it works, there will be more of it. There are a lot of works under development, from comics to games — as well as the custom LLM.
“There are things that can happen that we can’t foresee,” Rose said.
“It’s an interesting experiment,” Anderson said. “What I like most about it is the AI and blockchain are supporting cast members. They are not the store. A lot of the blockchain industry falls victim to self-serving uses of blockchain. What we are doing is we’re taking something that is intrinsically human, storytelling, for our entire human existence. We have valued storytelling, and we are using these tools. They are technological tools to change the way that we create, share, and build stories together. And that’s what I really love about this project.”
McKenna said, “What was important to us was that the community got to vote what became part of the central storyline of the Alien Worlds metaverse. Kevin Anderson has produced the foundational lore and then AI will continue to grow upon that, and the community will continue to vote on whether they want that to be considered canon.”
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