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There are plenty of angles for history to remember Elon Musk, but here’s a pitch from us at The A.V. Club: “Guy who took things that already existed and made them worse.” His cars explode, his social media platform is a cesspool, and his AI declared itself “MechaHitler.” Musk has long wanted to bring back Vine, the short-lived but beloved video platform, but hasn’t gotten around to it in the three years since buying Vine’s parent company Twitter (now X). But Musk has a new idea to make Vine great again. As he posted on Twitter/X, “We’re bringing back Vine, but in AI form.”
Um… okay? Musk offered no further details on what this would mean, but it doesn’t sound like any kind of improvement for Vine. Artificial intelligence video already exists and is clogging people’s feeds on YouTube, Facebook, and X with slop. Short-form video has also moved on from Vine in the form of Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and, most prominently, TikTok. If Musk means that his new Vine will have built-in AI tools to create AI video in-app, that may offer something a little different than TikTok. But there are plenty of generative AI video editors to choose from, so again, this idea doesn’t have a lot of fresh appeal.
More to the point, the legacy of Vine is real people making music, doing stunts, pulling pranks, and creating jokes within the parameters of six-second videos. It wouldn’t be all that impressive to watch a six-second AI video. But Musk seems to yearn for the kind of Internet clout that Twitter power users or Vine stars could generate back in the day (and which he hasn’t managed to capture for himself, no matter how much money he spends or what platforms he takes over). Vine, you’ll recall, launched the careers of such luminaries as Shawn Mendes, Liza Koshy, David Dobrik, King Bach, and Jake and Logan Paul. Who wouldn’t want to be listed among their number?
