2026-06-20
AI Slop, IOG X, and the Future of Marketing
- A defense of the Input Output X account after it posted an AI generated influencer for Midnight City that the community received very negatively.
- IO has stripped away its old legal review pipeline and downsized the account to about two people, empowered to move fast and experiment like a startup.
- Midnight City explores digital twins, agents, and voice cloning, and needs AI to manage a community that could reach millions in a year.
- Voice and personality cloning will feel human within one to two years, which is exactly why Midnight and Midnight Passport exist to prove human generated content.
- The plea is for the community to stop the perpetual outrage and stop treating every experiment that misses as bad faith from an enemy.
20 entries
The IO Twitter account used to route every tweet through a long legal review pipeline, making it sterile and boring.
Optimizing the company, IO removed those checks and downsized the account to about two people covering RealFi, Pogen, Midnight, and Blockfrost.
Midnight City's own X account keeps being taken down for impersonation without explanation, so its team used the IO account instead.
Midnight City explores digital twins and agents like Nix, Omega Claw, and Hermes, plus voice cloning with Diffusion Gemma and Qwen 3 TTS.
The team posted an AI generated influencer in good faith to showcase the possibilities, and it was received very negatively.
People read it as an attack on Cardano's KOLs and a plan to replace them with AI, the worst possible interpretation.
You cannot move fast as a startup if every mistake is treated as bad faith that means the whole thing should be torn down.
Midnight City could reach hundreds of thousands to millions of users within a year, so managing that community requires agents and AI.
The new IO thinks like startup founders on two week sprints, not a government agency where every action takes weeks of bureaucracy.
Crypto influencers outside Cardano have abused their position for pump and dumps and undisclosed economic relationships.
As a test he cloned the voice of Baldur's Gate 3's Shadowheart with Coqui TTS and had real time conversations via Diffusion Gemma.
Within one to two years voice cloning plus diffusion models will feel like talking to a real person, with video lip sync two to three years out.
Voice cloning and lip sync will reshape who people listen to, which is why Midnight and Midnight Passport exist to prove human generated content.
Calls on the Cardano community to calm down and stop taking offense at every action in a state of perpetual outrage.
IO is not the enemy but now both an infrastructure and a consumer product company that will keep trying new things.
Midnight City chases two KPIs, watchability, which lowers customer acquisition cost, and empathy, the Tamagotchi effect that lowers churn.
Star Stream can enable persistent on chain agents that act as decentralized event listeners triggering smart contracts.
The Leios testnet launches in three days, bringing a 60x speed up, with Parisen fast finality and ZK trustless bridges to follow.
The failed Cardano dApps and governance fatigue shrank the pie, which must be grown by being welcoming and commercializing the platform.
The governance debates proved IO is just one community member with no special rights, and his founder legacy no longer counts.