Okay, I don’t know for sure what this means, or how it would work in practice, as Elon sees it. But after many teases, Elon Musk has today again claimed that X is going to bring back Vine, though this time “in AI form.”
Does that mean that we’ll get a separate Vine app once again, or will it be a Vine-style feed within X?
And does the AI element relate to an algorithm, or a feed of AI-generated content?
First off, I highly doubt that X is ever going to launch a separate Vine app. It’s just too much engineering effort, and I don’t see X Corp shelling out to build another platform, or re-launch an old one, in its current state.
Maybe, if there was clear advertiser demand, and a path to monetization, it could bring back a separate Vine, but I suspect that given his “everything app” focus, Elon’s actually talking about bringing back a version of what Vine was, in terms of a feed of short-form videos, within X itself.
On the second point, my guess would be that Elon’s referring to a feed of AI-generated content, not an AI-moderated video feed.
Why is that? Because earlier in the week, Elon also said that the xAI team is working on a new text-to-video process, which he claimed would be called “Imagine.”
Musk said that xAI is developing a new AI process that will enable users to “make creative viral videos fast.” Which sounds like it would align with this latest Vine comment, with a new feed of AI-generated video clips in their own Vine-style feed.
Which is not bringing back Vine at all, but I can see how the dots connect from one perspective.
X’s text-to-video project is being powered by Hotshot, an AI video project that X acquired back in March.
Before being acquired by xAI, Hotshot had developed a range of text-to-video and text-to-GIF AI models, and had gained early traction among AI enthusiasts.
The logical next step for the technology within X is to enable text-to-video generation in-stream, which would then give X similar capacity to Google’s Veo model, which has already sparked a range of viral trends.
That, I’m guessing, is what Elon’s thinking, that X’s new text-to-video offering will immediately prove so popular that X will then be able to populate an all-new Vine-style feed, purely with generative AI clips.
But would that work? Do people really want a feed of random AI-generated video clips?
Well, as noted, Google’s Veo video generation engine has already sparked several content trends, and if X’s offering is similar, I could see the same happening, at least to some degree. But at the same time, I don’t think that it’ll be like Vine, and I don’t think that there’ll be a heap of interest in a dedicated feed of weird, limb-spawning, landscape morphing, AI-generated clips.
Also, many AI-generated videos in other apps are already verging into controversial territory, featuring depictions of racist and ableist stereotypes that you likely wouldn’t be able to film with real people.
Given X’s freedom of speech ethos, I suspect that’ll be even worse within its video generation process, giving X users all new ways to create controversial, divisive, offensive AI video clips.
Which could mean that this Vine-like feed is a just an ever-rolling conveyor belt of the worst the internet has to offer, condensed down into 10-second clips.
We’ll have to wait and see, but I don’t think that Elon’s view of bringing back Vine is what you would probably think.
