Vine restart app Divine comes with a ban on AI slope

Vine Divine Reboot App Arrives With AI Slop Ban

Remember Vine? The short-form video app from the days when people shared creative things just for fun and not primarily to maximize engagement and make more money? It's back, thanks in large part to Jack Dorsey, who was president of Twitter when it bought Vine a few months before its 2013 debut.

Divine — a rebooted version of the app with no affiliation to Vine, Twitter or X — is now available for iOS and Android. As with Vine, users create and share looping videos up to six seconds long.

However, access is currently by invitation only, with creators gradually attracting friends and followers before a wider rollout. Old-school winemakers such as Lele Pons, JimmyHere, MightyDuck and Jack and Jack have reclaimed their accounts. Some users are already posting vines and you can view them on the Divine website.

Jack Dorsey financed Divine

Dorsey funded Divine through the And Other Stuff open source development collective that he supports. Divine is built on the open Nostr protocol that Dorsey has been involved in for a long time, and he says creators will maintain control of their content.

According to a press release, it's designed primarily for "creativity and constraint on engagement for an advertising algorithm" and – get this – it's “a place for authentic, non-AI-generated media.” In fact, the app completely bans AI slops, which is delicious.

Divine uses a cryptographic approach to verify the authenticity of videos. New videos in the Divine feed have a label indicating whether they are created by humans. You can tap or click on it for more details and run an AI generative detection scanner.

“By bringing Vine back to a decentralized network, they are finally fixing all the mistakes,” Dorsey said. "It's no secret that we haven't found a business model for Vine. One of Divine's founding principles is that creators will always have full control of their content and followers, allowing them to create and grow their own revenue streams. I anticipate Divine will provide a host of tools and services to support the growth of the creator economy."

The team behind Divine has integrated over 500,000 videos from the original app. These were scraped from an archive created before Twitter shut down Vine in 2017. The project is led by Evan Henshaw-Plath, a former Twitter employee known as "Rabble."