No, Vine isn’t Coming Back

So Vine isn’t really coming back after all.

As you may recall, a couple of weeks back, X owner Elon Musk announced that X was planning to bring back Vine, but in AI form. At the time, I speculated that this was actually about xAI’s new “Imagine” text-to-video tool, which is currently in Beta testing among selected X Premium users.

And now, Elon has confirmed this, posting that:

So as Musk says, X isn’t bringing back Vine, the app. But instead, in his view at least, the new Grok Imagine functionality is “AI Vine,” and will provide similar functionality and engagement as Vine did in the past.

But it won’t.

I mean, sure, there’s going to be a new influx of AI-generated video on X, which will be largely dominated by right-wing memes (as this is the primary audience that can currently access the option, being paying X Premium users).

But it’s nothing like Vine, which was TikTok before TikTok, providing an endless, full-screen, vertically-aligned feed of short-form video clips, which helped to kickstart the careers of many now-established online creators.

Vine, as many have noted, was really the beginning of the short-form video trend. But without a dedicated app and presentation format, and without providing a stream of super short-form content (Vines were originally only 6-seconds long), this will be nothing like what Vine was.

Instead, it’s just going to be more weird AI-generated video clips posted to X, of which some will be good, some will be interesting. And a lot will be rubbish.

Which, I guess, maybe does actually replicate what Vine had been, but the user experience and engagement process is not the same.

And we’ve already got this in TikTok and via Reels. AI-generated clips have been gradually infiltrating these platforms as well, so enabling the same functionality on X likely won’t have a major impact.

So, sorry to burst your bubble Vine fans, but Vine isn’t coming back. All that’s happening is that random AI clips will now be filtering through your X feed.

Though as Elon also notes, they are working to restore the Vine video archive. So you can check out videos from ten years ago. Maybe find some classics.

But again, this is not the return of Vine, but a re-angling of what Vine kind of was, in order to promote xAI’s latest tool.

X hasn’t announced plans for a broader roll-out of its “Imagine” text-to-video tools as yet.