Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and CEO of Input Output, defended an AI-generated influencer post shared from Input Output’s X account after criticism from parts of the Cardano community. In a video address, Hoskinson framed the episode as a product and communications experiment tied to Midnight City, while acknowledging that the post was poorly received and clarifying that it was not intended as a slight against Cardano creators or influencers.
Hoskinson Defends AI Influencer Post After Backlash
Hoskinson said the disputed post came from an empowered social media and media team experimenting with AI-generated content for Midnight City, one of the ventures under the broader Input Output group. He said some community members interpreted the post as suggesting that Cardano key opinion leaders, or KOLs, were no longer valued and could be replaced by AI. Hoskinson rejected that reading, saying the post was meant to showcase emerging technology around digital twins, agents and AI-led media.
“This was in good faith just to showcase some cool new things and the possibility of these things,” Hoskinson said. “It obviously was received very negatively, and a lot of people seem to think that this was an attack on the KOLs of Cardano or in some way connotes that we don’t think they’re valuable and we just want to replace them all with AI.”
Hoskinson tied the experiment to Midnight City’s broader focus on AI agents and digital identity. He said the team has been exploring programs and partner technologies including Nyx, Omega Claw, Open Claw and Hermes, while he has personally been testing voice-cloning technologies using Diffusion Gemma and Qwen 3 TTS. He also said Midnight City’s own X presence had been taken down multiple times for “impersonation,” leading its media team to use the Input Output account for some experimentation.
Input Output Shifts Toward Startup-Style Comms
A central part of Hoskinson’s response was that Input Output’s communications model has changed. He said the company previously used a heavily curated process in which official posts went through multiple checks, including legal review, but that the organization has since reduced the process and downsized the team handling the account to roughly two people. The account now shares public relations and media content for several ventures, including RealFi, Midnight, Midnight City, Cardano, Blockfrost and other unannounced projects.
“We no longer have densely curated external comms where everything is pathologically examined 14 times and it takes two weeks to send a tweet,” Hoskinson said. “You can’t do that anymore. Not in this environment, not these days, not with these resources, not when you want to grow and catch ahead.”
Hoskinson said the new approach carries risk but is intended to make Input Output operate more like a startup as it commercializes products. He said not every post comes to his desk and that he has told teams he will take responsibility when experiments fail. “Second, not everything that’s tweeted these days comes to my desk. It seldom does,” he said. “I’ve empowered the people beneath me to move fast and do things. And I told them, I have your back.”
He also argued that AI-led communications could become necessary if Midnight City scales as planned. Hoskinson said that, if successful, Midnight City could reach “hundreds of thousands if not millions of users within the next 12 months,” making it impractical for human community or media teams to scale linearly with user growth. He described the project’s two main KPIs as “watchability,” or how engaging the game world is, and “empathy,” or how lifelike and relatable its agents feel to users.
The broader argument was that AI-generated media, voice cloning and agentic systems are advancing quickly enough that crypto projects need systems for identity and content verification. Hoskinson said he expects voice-cloning technology to be capable of producing near-perfect copies of a person’s voice within 12 to 24 months, with video generation and lip syncing potentially following over a 24-to-36-month horizon. He linked that risk to Midnight and Midnight Passport, which he described as tools for proof of human and proof of human-generated content.
Hoskinson closed by apologizing to anyone who objected to the AI influencer post while maintaining that more experiments are likely as Input Output’s teams test new formats. “We’re not trying to replace the KOLs of Cardano. We value them. We think they’re important,” he said. “We’re going to continue with our Twitter and our other accounts to try new things. Some you’re going to like, some you’re not going to like.”
Hoskinson’s response positions the backlash as part of a broader tension between community expectations, AI-driven media experimentation and Input Output’s push to operate with faster startup-style communications. The key clarification from his remarks was that the AI influencer post was not intended to diminish Cardano creators, but rather emerged from Midnight City-related experimentation with agents, digital twins and future-facing distribution models.
AI Transparency Note: This article was prepared with the assistance of an AI system based on the sources listed and was reviewed, edited, and approved by a human editor before publication. All quotes, data points, and factual claims are intended to be grounded in the cited source material; however, errors cannot be ruled out entirely.
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