TLDR: At this explosive moment for AI and crypto, we’re proud to announce Lore, an on-chain experiment in human/AI storytelling. Lore is a round-robin style addventure story where humans and AI take turns writing sentences that AI illustrates into beautiful, one-of-a-kind NFT’s. It works like this:
- You enter a sentence to begin a new story or add to an existing one.
- A language AI called GPT-3 uses the story including your sentence to generate a new one.
- An image AI called VQ-GAN + CLIP adds an image to illustrate that combination.
- The combination is minted into a one-of-a-kind NFT, which can be combined to create “books.”
Starting today, you can join our community and be first in line to create new stories before our December 1st launch by joining our presale here on Mirror. If you’re interested in being among the first to join this experiment, please contribute to the crowdfund today, join us in testing on Discord and follow us on Twitter.
In a 2013 essay in Wired, Alvy Ray Smith wrote about how he and his Pixar co-founders used Moore's Law, the observation he described as "Everything good about computers gets an order of magnitude better every five years," to gain the confidence that computational power would eventually improve enough to make Toy Story:
"The secret was Moore’s Law, and not just in the technical way one would think. The enabling idea of our vision was computation, of course, but the idea of computation alone would not have gotten us far. [We] used the Law to anticipate the future and make good business decisions through the long years we waited for the computer animations we all envisioned to become reality."
Moved by the powerful insight that technology just keeps getting better, Pixar has shaped our culture by equipping the best storytellers in the world with the tools to express themselves in new ways.
Today’s explosion of artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies represents a similar opportunity to build a new epoch of storytelling that is decentralized and limitless. The Pixar of this moment, powered by orders of magnitude decreases in the costs of machine intelligence and human collaboration, will not be a company that makes movies, but an infinite game in the metaverse whose participants are also its owners, creators, and consumers.
We’re experimenting with an early expression of this idea by building Lore, and can’t wait to see what you think. Below, we’ll describe what we’re building, why we’re building it, and how you can get involved in the presale to be the first in line before our 12/1 launch.
We are at the beginning of a never-ending story
Quantity has a quality of its own.
It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that a machine is now capable of infinitely riffing on a single idea. What’s even harder to understand is that, one day, examples like the ones above will be look upon as primitive. Just as a captivating full-length 3D animated movie was inconceivable during the experimentation of the early eighties, even a full-length novel generated by artificial intelligence still seems far out. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
In the same way that Toy Story used Moore’s law to kick off a new era of animation, advancements in language transformers like GPT-3 in the near future will not simply enable a single AI-written novel, but an infinite cascade of stories of every format. Like magicians, we will be able to conjure every imaginable character, theme, setting, plot, and emotion out of thin air, moved by AI in ways that transcend human capacity. In this real-world version of Borges' Garden of Forking Paths, the only limits to the stories we will be able to create are the limits of our attention.
In the face of this infinite possibility, we are launching Lore as an experiment in constraints, seeking to understand how a community can use the blockchain to collaboratively tell a story with AI one sentence at a time, while collectively owning its output. Our goal is to build the foundation of a decentralized global writers room that learns how to effectively communicate with AI to create the stories of the future, while sharing in the upside of the value we create. The Pixar of the future will be a DAO, and this is an early expression of how we might get there.
Here’s how it works:
Lore is a round-robin style addventure story where humans and AI take turns writing sentences that AI illustrates into beautiful, one-of-a-kind NFT’s. Anyone can contribute to Lore by minting a branch into an existing story (free), or starting a new one (paid) using our story explorer at makelore.xyz.
When you mint, Lore passes your sentence and the entire story (if you're contributing to an existing story) as a prompt to our AI and returns the first sentence from its completion to create a human-AI sentence pair, like this one:
Once your human-AI sentence pair is minted, we use another AI technique to generate a beautiful illustration, like the ones above and throughout this post! Your completed NFT will show up in our story explorer and on OpenSea, and will be available for others to branch off of in the future to continue the story.
Every two weeks, the community will vote on which storyline should be canonized into the Book of Lore, and the winning chapter will be auctioned off as a digital book, with the proceeds split between our treasury and the winning storyline’s contributors. Our tentative plan is to allow minting sentences beginning on 12/1 and auction the first book roughly two weeks later. In each new book, we’ll experiment with new territory, like storytelling techniques, visual styles, and more.
Participants in today’s crowdfund will gain the $LORE token, granting early access to mint the first sentences of the first stories, as well as to a unique Discord channel shared with the founders. We’ll use the money from this crowdfund to offset our expenses so far in this project.
If you’re interested in being among the first to join this experiment, please contribute to the crowdfund today, and join us on Discord and follow us on Twitter. We can’t wait to see what stories we can tell together.
With gratitude,
Team Lore
Thank you to Katherine Crowson and Hillel Wayne for making VQ-GAN open and accessible to the world!