Jack Dorsey Releases Vine Reboot Where AI Content Is Banned

Twitter co-founder and blockchain evangelist Jack Dorsey has made good on his promise to revive the much-missed six-second video platform Vine — well, sort of.

like TechCrunch According to reports, the rebooted platform, dubbed diVine, will include over 100,000 archived videos from the platform, which is likely only a small portion of the platform’s original database. Vine had more than 200 million monthly active users at its peak ten years ago, but was shut down in 2016.

But the reboot has a hidden feature up its sleeve: AI-generated content is completely blocked, and any suspected use of AI will be flagged and prevented from being posted — a silver bullet for an internet overrun by sluggish AI.

The old collection of Vine videos has been painstakingly archived by a group called Archive Time, “a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers, and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage.”

Now, one of Twitter’s first employees, Evan “Rubble” Henshaw Plath, who works on Dorsey’s nonprofit “And Other Things,” has led the charge to recreate the once-beloved video platform by carefully unearthing that archive and making it available online once again.

“So, basically, I’m saying, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” Henshaw Plath said TechCrunch. “Can we do something that takes us back, allows us to see those old things, but also allows us to see the age of social media where you can either control your algorithms, or you can choose who you follow, and it’s just a feed, and where you know a real person recorded the video?”

Henshaw-Plath’s description of an emotional age in which we don’t have to deal with annoying AI errors is certainly a sign of the times. It’s a harsh reminder of how quickly technology has invaded almost every aspect of our daily lives, clogging our feeds with derivative, soulless garbage.

“Companies see AI involvement and think people want it,” he added. “It’s confusing, like – yes, people interact with it; yes, we use this stuff – but we also want to control our lives and our social experiences. So I think there’s a nostalgia for the early era of Web 2.0, for the era of blogging, for the era that gave us podcasting, the era where we were building communities, rather than just tinkering with algorithms.”

Instead of letting anyone sign up for diVine, the new app takes an interesting approach. The people behind the effort are giving priority to about 60,000 creators who managed to save their videos, allowing them to take over their Vine accounts again and even post new videos.

But generative AI content is strictly prohibited. Henshaw-Plath adopted technology from the Guardian Project, a human rights non-profit, to check whether a video was recorded on a smartphone, according to the British newspaper The Guardian. TechCrunch.

The new app is also built entirely on an open source protocol called Nostr, “enabling developers to build a new generation of apps without the need for venture capital support, toxic business models or huge teams of engineers,” Dorsey said in a statement. TechCrunch.

Interest in the project has been tremendous so far.

“Well, that was fast, 10,000 people joined us for a video test ride in four hours,” Hensaw Plath tweeted Thursday afternoon.

Although it’s available on Android, don’t expect diVine to arrive in the Apple App Store anytime soon.

“Apple is typically frustrated and clueless when it comes to its App Store reviews,” Hensawh-Plath wrote in a separate post. “I just got rejected again.”

There may be rough waters ahead. Former X-Twitter owner Elon Musk has already promised to bring back the Vine archive in August — so when he hears wind of diVine, it wouldn’t be a shock if he tried to shut it down.

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