'Btw, we recently found the Vine video archive' says Elon Musk after declaring Grok's video generation to be the AI equivalent

Remember Vine? If you were a young person eight years ago, there's a good chance you're a little nostalgic for this TikTok predecessor. As well as having the platform to thank for creators like Drew Gooden and Danny Gonzalez, it's also responsible for the Paul brothers. Good or bad, it seems like the Vine video archive could resurface in the future, if Elon Musk's word is anything to go by.

In a post on X declaring "Grok imagine is AI Vine", Elon Musk bookended the announcement by saying, "Btw, we recently found the Vine video archive." On top of attempting to restore user access, Musk says this would mean "You can post them if you want."

Notably, this announcement doesn't specifically say 'Vine is coming back.' This could mean Vine is making a comeback, or it could suggest that users can access their old videos.

Vine was a short-lived video hosting app, where users could post six-second clips. This format forced users to be creative, ensuring every joke had to pay off rather quickly. It rolled out on different platforms in 2013 and became the most popular free app on the App Store by April of the same year. By 2015, it had over 200 million users monthly, but shut down at the start of 2017. The company formerly known as Twitter purchased Vine back in 2012, so it fuelled the app's launch, popularity explosion, and then subsequent closure.

A Vine archive did exist for two years, only officially being discontinued in April 2019. Musk will be the second person to bring Vine's archive back, and it seems like this announcement was made partially to promote Grok Imagine, a generative AI video and image generator.

When Elon Musk says 'Grok Imagine is AI Vine', it's hard to fully parse what this means because Grok Imagine is a tool to make videos based on your prompts.

Apps like TikTok and Vine thrive off of their unpredictable streams of content; getting access to tens of thousands of accounts, all with different perspectives, stories, and jokes, is why these apps are so beloved. A glorified form of social media, they're a way of connecting to others in short bursts, and you can simply swipe away when you get results you don't like.

Making your own prompt-based entertainment feels like a particularly strange replacement for an app that operates at digital breakneck speeds, especially when we consider the time it takes to generate those videos. This is before mentioning that the element people liked about Vine wasn't the look, nor the technical requirements: it was the community that Vine's users cared about, with its creativity still talked about to this day.

Huddles, otherwise known as Byte, otherwise known as Clash, was a spiritual successor to Vine made in collaboration with Dom Hoffman, the cofounder of Vine. The reason you likely aren't familiar with any of those names is because it was discontinued back in 2023. It was Vine in everything other than name, but it just didn't have the community Vine had; it didn't enjoy millions of people building towards the tapestry that is a trend.

Getting access to Vine, and some of the jokes that haven't been crammed into hour-long Vine compilations, would certainly be nice, but it makes an 'AI Vine' feel redundant—I'll stick with TikTok for now.