Space Junk lets the audience rewrite with AI

The Future. Space Junk, an animated adult comedy that premiered last month, includes fans in the writers room via the blockchain and AI. While the community-storytelling features won’t work for most shows, Space Junk (like other projects such as Runner and The Fringe) hopes to prove that fan-generated narratives could be a fun new genre in and of itself.

Animation & me
Created by Workaholics co-creator Dominic Russo, Space Junk follows a group of astronaut garbage collectors, voiced by Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite) and Tony Cavalero (The Righteous Gemstones)… with storylines possibly co-written by you.

• A branded NFT from Toonstar, the show’s production company, allows holders to craft story pitches with an online AI version of one of the robot characters, Wellbecca (the AI is trained in the world of the show).
• The stories generated with the Wellbecca chatbot can then be posted on Toonstar’s blockchain and upvoted (using the “f*ck yeah button”), with the top-voted ones quickly working their way into the show’s narrative.

So far, the gambit has been pretty successful — Toonstar reports that the show has 15x the engagement of its last show, The Gimmicks.

It looks like everyone wants to feel like they’re part of the writers room.