NEUKO is developing a new kind of creative platform, where AI tools, community storytelling, and character-driven content come together. Founded by former Doodles team members, NEUKO’s first project is G*BOY, a character designed to explore what’s possible when creators have access to custom tools and creative control. At the heart of the project is $GBOY, which the team describes as the first AI-native IP token and a way to anchor participation in the ecosystem.

In this interview, the NEUKO team talks about how they’ve approached consistency in AI-generated storytelling, why they prioritize building before minting, and what it means to design tools that invite the community to help shape the future of a shared creative world.

OpenSea: Before NEUKO, you were part of the team at Doodles, one of the most recognizable creative brands in web3. What inspired you to move from that world into co-founding NEUKO? Was there a specific moment when you realized you wanted to build something entirely new around AI and creativity?

NEUKO: The lightbulb moment for us was watching the traditional content production pipeline become completely flattened. Pieces of content that used to take a team of seasoned professionals weeks were being finished in hours by a single individual with a handful of these AI tools and some technical expertise. We very quickly imagined a future where no technical expertise would be required to spin up the next great entertainment franchises. If you had creativity, taste, and the right framework we believed anyone could strike out on their own. 

At the same time we realized the advantage companies who were created post-GPT were going to have in this next wave. Inertia is a powerful thing and being able to start with a foundation where every team member is AI-native and exploring these tools on a regular basis is a powerful thing. AI is not bolted on to our product, it’s the very bedrock on which our company was founded. Our default when looking to solve problems is to extend our own skillsets through the use of AI rather than bring on additional human capital. That just gives you way more flexibility as a business to make the right targeted bets. 

OpenSea: You’ve described NEUKO as building AI-native IP. What does that mean in practice? How does AI-native creation differ from traditional IP development or AI-assisted art?

NEUKO: Traditional development pipelines are sequential with multiple handoffs between specialized workers. The illustrator may hand over to the animator who then hands over to the sound production team once the piece is finalized. This has made traditional development resource intensive and slow. 

In building AI-native IP, the linear pipeline of specialists is flattened. Workstreams that used to be sequential can now be done in parallel by one individual. Illustration and animation are reduced to a single step while voices can be overlaid in close to real time. 

In practice this means every piece of the content production pipeline is built with AI. From building our own custom trained LoRA’s for the G*BOY character design, to creating our character’s voices, to creating our NFT assets, to developing our video production suite. Everything is built from the ground up using AI tooling.

OpenSea: G*BOY is the first release in the NEUKO ecosystem. What made him the right character to introduce this concept of AI-native storytelling? What kind of creative or technical lessons came from shaping him?

NEUKO: G*BOY was the right starting point because he has such a simple, iconic silhouette that can be represented through almost any creative expression. He has a few non-negotiable traits that keep him recognizable, but everything else can flex. You can distort him, restyle him, push him into different genres, and he still reads instantly.

One of our biggest lessons was learning which of those recognizable traits the model actually likes to work with. Some details you think are central get ignored sometimes, his ears for example, and you have to sometimes really push a model to get them to respect it. Then there's tiny things that you assumed were trivial that end up becoming expressive anchors. His cape for example allows us to show so much more movement and emotion than we were expecting in the initial character design.

All those things made him the perfect subject for understanding how models think and what their preferences are. Once we started exploring all of the ways he could be represented, the model's strengths and weaknesses started to show really fast.

OpenSea: You’ve pushed back on the “mint first, build later” playbook that dominates web3. How do you see NEUKO’s “build first” approach changing how communities form and how meaningful outcomes get created in this space?

NEUKO: The web3 community has smartened up. They no longer will accept promises before delivery. They’ve been burned too many times before and want to see a real working product before committing their time and energy to a project. Similarly, as builders we wanted to be able to identify who our core community was before introducing any commercialization. We’ve seen teams often rush to monetize only to find they didn’t do the work necessary to have a functioning community on the other side of that monetization moment. 

We hope we’re setting a new standard for delivering experiences for our community and ensuring we always give more value than we ask for. 

OpenSea: In your post, you argue that general-purpose AI tools have failed to serve creators who want consistent, high-quality outputs. What did you and your team do differently to fix that with G*BOY?

NEUKO: General purpose tools are really good at single shooting high-quality outputs for one-off pieces of content that impress you once. But they are built for everyone, which means they flatten everyone. So it’s easy to start, but hard to stand out. They are also not great at maintaining consistency for use in a repeatable framework. This distinction is critical for content creators who are looking to tell stories that evolve over time. At NEUKO, we built custom trained LoRA’s from scratch so our characters would maintain consistency over time. We can keep his look stable across thousands of pieces of content and work with a dependable foundation instead of a slot machine.

OpenSea: One of NEUKO’s core ideas is that community work shouldn’t be treated as fan fiction. How do you imagine shared authorship evolving in an ecosystem where fans can directly co-create with you?

NEUKO: By deploying tools that enable the community’s ability to create content at the same quality as the core team, we're unlocking a massive amount of leverage as a brand. Instead of storylines that are filled out over months, we have the ability to react to our community in a way that simply isn’t possible with traditional content development. When we see something picking up within the community, from inside jokes to fan theories, we can quickly adapt and integrate so their actions become a part of the story. In this way we are one of the few brands that actually realizes the potential of co-creation with a community to shape its development. 

OpenSea: The G*BOY app lets users remix, customize, and extend your world. What are the most surprising or inspiring things you’ve seen the community make so far?

NEUKO: What’s surprised us most is how fast the volume of content has compounded since the community has gotten involved. We’ve gone from hundreds of images made per week to thousands. What actually inspires us is the personality in it. Most people aren’t just generating generic scenes of G*BOY. Their taste leaks into the work. Their style choices, their sense of humor, their visual instincts are all distinct and we've started to recognize certain creators’ work.

We were talking about this the other night. Each founder has certain community pieces we always gravitate toward, and when we check who made them, it’s usually the same creator every time. And the funny part is that each of us gravitates toward a different creator. So people are not only expanding on our world, but they're cultivating their own distinct creative taste within our tooling.

OpenSea: Beyond G*BOY, what does success look like for NEUKO? Is it about scale, quality, community creativity, or something else entirely?

NEUKO: We are optimizing for fun and empowerment. It’s our belief that if we make experiences where our community feels a sense of belonging and can be a part of something greater than themselves then success will come. We often talk about creating the feeling of the world’s smallest IP. While everyone seems to want to compete on creating the biggest brands to take on the traditional powerhouses, we think the best way to take on the system is to subvert its expectations completely. That means we will never follow the traditional playbook of success. We will always focus on super serving our core community with the understanding if we can make them happy then everything else will follow.  

OpenSea: Where do you see NEUKO six months or a year from now?

NEUKO: Still making fun things on the internet with our friends. 

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