Elon Musk Announces Restoration of Vine Archive, Introduces AI-Powered Video Creation Tool

Elon Musk says he's bringing back Vine's archive | TechCrunch

Elon Musk says he's bringing back Vine -- sort of. The X owner announced over the weekend that the company discovered the video archive for the popular short-form video app, thought to have been deleted, and is working to restore user access. Vine -- something of a precursor to today's TikTok, but with only 6-second-long looping videos -- was acquired by Twitter back in October 2012 for $30 million to expand the social media platform's video ambitions. Unfortunately for Vine creators and fans, the company fumbled the app's potential and decided to shut down Vine in 2016 by limiting all new uploads. The following year, it was fully discontinued, though a user archive remained for a time. Despite no longer having an App Store presence, Vine still has a place in the internet's collective cultural consciousness. Through online compilations of the best Vines uploaded to YouTube, and through the careers of numerous creators who got their start on Vine, the company lives on to some extent, and its content continues to be discovered by new generations. Musk himself seemed interested in bringing back Vine after acquiring Twitter (now called X) in October 2022. In a poll posted on the social media app, he asked Twitter's users, "Bring back Vine?" to which nearly 70% responded "yes." Axios reported at the time that Twitter had devoted some engineers to working on the Vine reboot, but nothing ever came of it. It's unclear whether Musk has any ambitions for Vine beyond getting its archive back online, however. In the same post about restoring Vine, he also touted that Grok's new video-creation feature, Grok Imagine, also available to X Premium+ subscribers, is "AI Vine." That suggests that his interests in video creation no longer lie with human creativity, but in human-directed AI prompting. Whether or not Musk will actually deliver on the promise remains to be seen, as the X post could have just been another way to draw attention to Grok AI, rather than being representative of a real effort inside the company to make old Vines available for reposting.

Elon Musk says the Vine archive is coming back

Elon Musk recently announced that , after teasing the return of the social platform over the last week or so. The X owner says that the company recently discovered the entire video archive of the once-popular short-form video app and is working to restore user access. Twitter bought Vine all the way back in 2012. Musk says that X users will be able to post these Vines, but it's just an archive. In other words, this doesn't sound like a renaissance for the actual platform. It remains unclear as to what Musk's intentions are for the brand, but the announcement about the returning archive was accompanied by an ad for the . He called the service the "AI Vine." Why expand energy to make short-form content when you can type some words into a prompting field? There's also the Musk of it all. He doesn't have the best track record when it comes to . We'll just have to wait and see if the Vine video archive actually returns and what happens after that. For the uninitiated, Vine was sort of like TikTok before TikTok. It was a platform for 6-second looping videos. The app was extremely popular for a while, but Twitter never really capitalized on that after its $30 million purchase. It was shut down in 2016, which ended uploads, and was .

So Far, Elon Musk's Revival of Vine Is Seriously Disappointing

For quite some time now, Elon Musk has been promising to bring back Vine. Back in the day, the short-lived TikTok precursor allowed users to post dopey 6-second videos that looped and could be easily shared. However, as the Tesla billionaire's plans for the short-form video distributor come into view, it increasingly seems like he (as per usual) got us all excited for nothing. Vine, which was purchased by Twitter in 2012, has been officially dead for a little over half a decade now. After Twitter killed uploads of the app's videos in 2016, Vine's archive subsisted for another three years or so until 2019, when the platform pulled support for it. Since then, all that has survived is a nostalgia for those halcyon days when short-form video was novel and joy-inducing, instead of being a grim staple of our increasingly frenetic information landscape. Musk initially floated the idea of bringing the video-sharing app back in 2022, not long after he purchased Twitter. Since then, he has repeatedly teased the app's return, much to the delight of site users. Last April, Musk again touched on resurrecting Vine with one of his many X polls. "Bring back Vine?" he asked. A vast majority of respondents voted "yes." In January, an X user tweeted at Musk, "think it's time to bring it back." And the Tesla CEO personally replied, "We’re looking into it." However, as Vine's "return" has approached, it seems increasingly clear that the app may not be exactly how you remember it. On Monday, Musk promised that the archive of old Vine videos would return in some form. However, it seems increasingly doubtful that the app will be an active service that users can use to make new videos. Instead, Musk has implied that Grok's new AI video generator, Imagine (which, Musk has bragged, can be used to create NSFW material), will act as a replacement. "Grok Imagine is AI Vine!" Musk wrote, in an X post on Saturday. Little other information was shared, but it left onlookers with the sad suspicion that the new Vine won't resemble the fun-fueled video clips of yesteryear and will be more about repackaging the AI-generated porn slop that's taking over everyone's feeds uninvited. Is Musk saying that Grok Imagine is the new Vine? Or will a new version of Vine be launched by X, alongside the archive of old videos? It's all unclear at the moment. If the resurrection of Vine just ends up being Grok's AI video app, with Musk dubbing it a "return" of Vine, then we will all have been taken for a ride, once again. Gizmodo reached out to X for more information. That said, it's not like anybody really needs Vine now. The app occupies a peculiar spot in American tech history, in that it predated many other short-form video services that have gone on to become ubiquitous by copying its business model (see: Reels and TikTok). Yet despite being a pioneer in the category of apps whose primary societal contribution has been the shrinking of our collective attention span, it seems to have found success just a little too early. After Twitter's acquisition of the app, it enjoyed a few good years before confronting a boom of those competitor apps that ultimately outpaced it.

'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.

Elon Musk says Vine archive will be restored

Vine may return in archive form as Musk promotes Grok Imagine an AI video tool for X Premium+ subscribers. Elon Musk, owner of X, announced the discovery and planned restoration of Vine's video archive, a short-form video application previously thought to be deleted. Vine, a platform featuring six-second looping videos, was acquired by Twitter in October 2012 for $30 million. This acquisition aimed to expand Twitter's video capabilities. However, the application was shut down in 2016 when new uploads were restricted. Vine was fully discontinued in 2017, although a user archive remained accessible for a period following its shutdown. Despite its cessation, Vine continues to maintain a presence in online cultural memory through compilations on platforms such as YouTube and through the continued careers of creators who gained initial recognition on the service. Musk had previously indicated interest in reviving Vine following his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022. He conducted a poll on the social media platform, asking users about bringing back Vine. Approximately 70% of respondents voted affirmatively. Reports from Axios at that time indicated that Twitter engineers were assigned to work on a Vine reboot; however, no such reboot was subsequently released. The extent of Musk's plans for Vine beyond archive restoration remains undefined. In his announcement regarding Vine's archive, he also promoted Grok Imagine, an AI video-creation feature available to X Premium+ subscribers, referring to it as "AI Vine." This statement suggests a current focus on AI-driven video content rather than user-generated human creativity. The actual delivery on the promise of restoring the Vine archive is presently uncertain, as the X post could serve to promote Grok AI.

Elon Musk is Bringing Back Your Old Favorite Vines

Vine was the original short-form video platform, allowing users to create looping clips that were just 6 seconds long. Elon Musk recently shared a post on X, announcing, "Grok Imagine is AI Vine!" while also dropping a surprise that he had stumbled upon all of Vine's archived videos that were thought to be deleted. Musk mentions in the post that the archives still exist and that his team is working to restore them for public access. For those of you too young to remember, Vine was the original short-form video content platform, years before TikTok or Instagram Reels took over. It allowed users to create just 6 seconds long videos, so creators had to be very creative within that tiny window. It was the platform that gave fame to many well-known creators like Jake and Logan Paul, Drew Gooden, Lele Pons, Liza Koshy, and Amanda Cerny. Vine was bought by Twitter back in the day, but it was later shut down, and with it, all of its content was also lost to the internet, only found in hour-long compilations on YouTube. But with Elon bringing that content back from the grave, we might see a wave of nostalgic Vine videos resurfacing on the internet. Heck, some of those video clips still have the potential to go viral even today, and who knows, maybe revive some long-lost Vine creators. What is your favorite Vine that you still miss to this day? Let us know in the comments below.

Elon Musk says X will bring back Vine -- with an AI twist -- to...

Elon Musk will bring back the defunct short-video platform Vine -- only this time with an artificial intelligence twist that could transform how users create and share content online. The tech billionaire revealed Monday that his social media company X, formerly Twitter, found the full library of the six-second video app. "We recently found the Vine video archive (thought it had been deleted) and are working on restoring user access, so you can post them if you want," Musk wrote. Last month, Musk said he was "bringing back Vine, but in AI form" to take on video app-sharing rivals TikTok and Instagram. Musk's post on X stoked excitement among former users of the beloved app, which Twitter shut down in 2017 after struggling to compete with newer platforms. Unlike the original Vine, which required users to film their own six-second clips, Musk's reimagined version will harness AI to generate videos based on simple text descriptions. Users could potentially type phrases like "a cat breakdancing in Times Square" or "Shakespearean drama in a McDonald's" and watch as the system instantly creates corresponding video content complete with sound. The technology driving this revival centers around Grok Imagine, a comprehensive text-to-video AI generator that operates through X's chatbot system. Early testing and demonstrations suggest the tool can produce creative and often viral short videos much faster than competing AI platforms, making it well-suited for Vine's signature brief format. Beta testing of Grok Imagine has shown promising results for generating whimsical and engaging content that could appeal to the same audience that made the original Vine a cultural phenomenon. Musk's posts about the relaunch of Vine racked up tens of millions of views. Cryptocurrency traders jumped on meme coins connected to the announcement, while creators and old Vine fans celebrated the potential comeback. Analysts see this as Musk's play to make X a real threat to TikTok and Instagram Reels. Vine originally took off because of its six-second limit, which forced people to get creative. The app launched countless internet stars before Twitter shut it down when it couldn't make money or keep up with competitors. Experts think AI could solve the problems that killed Vine the first time. Instead of needing to film, edit, and polish videos yourself, anyone could just type an idea and get a finished product. It removes the biggest hurdle for casual users who wanted to create but didn't have the skills or time. This fits into Musk's bigger plan to turn X into something much more than a text-based social network. Since buying the company, he's been adding features left and right, trying to compete with every major platform out there.