Vine is back — but this time, AI isn't invited
Image: divine.video
Nearly a decade after Twitter shut down Vine, the six-second looping video app that helped define internet comedy in the 2010s, a new platform called Divine has relaunched its spirit with a distinctly modern twist: a hard line against artificial intelligence. The app, which officially launched in August 2026 after nine months of development and beta testing, hosts more than two million original Vine videos recovered from the platform's archive, and requires that any new content be recorded live within the app rather than uploaded from a camera roll.
Divine was built by Evan Henshaw-Plath, a former Twitter employee known online as Rabble, with funding from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey — the same executive who acquired Vine in 2013 and ultimately shut it down in 2017. Dorsey holds no equity or ownership in the new venture, according to reporting on the launch. Henshaw-Plath has said the goal is not simply nostalgia but a corrective to what short-form video has become. "I want to see things that are creative and human and that are weird…there's a way in which AI generates this sort of mediocrity," he told CNN.
The app's anti-AI mechanism is more technically involved than a simple upload restriction. Divine does not accept video files from a user's camera roll for new posts; instead, users must record directly within the app's built-in camera, which integrates ProofMode, an open-source verification tool from the Guardian Project that cryptographically signs each video at the moment of capture using a device-specific key.
The system is also working toward full integration of C2PA, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity standard used by major camera manufacturers and AI companies including Adobe, Google, Meta and OpenAI, which embeds a tamper-evident record of where and how a video was made directly into its file. Verified videos display a special authenticity badge. Divine has acknowledged that its detection is not foolproof — some technology outlets have noted that methods such as screen-recording AI-generated footage could still slip past cryptographic checks — and the platform says it is combining automated detection with machine learning and community reporting as additional layers of defence.
The archive itself was a significant undertaking. Volunteers had preserved Vine's original footage in bulk data files after the platform's 2017 shutdown, and Henshaw-Plath has said he built custom software to unpack those files and match each recovered video back to its original likes and comments. Original Vine creators can now reclaim their old accounts to curate or remove their archived content. Divine is built on Nostr, a decentralised protocol also used by platforms positioning themselves as alternatives to traditional social media, which allows users to move their profiles and content to other decentralised services rather than being locked into a single platform.
Reaction to the relaunch has largely tracked a familiar current in online culture: fatigue with AI-generated content flooding social feeds, and a longing for the specific, chaotic creativity Vine was known for in its original run. Divine had accumulated around 100,000 users shortly after its public launch, according to its founder, with early activity including videos referencing 2010s-era memes alongside posts marking the platform's return. The launch follows similar moves by platforms like Pinterest and LinkedIn to respond to user frustration with AI-generated content cluttering their feeds, though Divine's approach — blocking a category of content outright rather than labelling it — is more restrictive than most mainstream platforms have attempted.
Whether that approach can sustain a platform at scale remains an open question. Divine is invite-only in its earlier phases and only recently opened to the public, and commentators covering the launch have noted that Dorsey's financial backing does not guarantee Divine a durable business model in a landscape where numerous platforms have tried to position themselves as an alternative to the "tech villain of the moment." For now, though, Divine offers something increasingly rare on the modern internet: a bet that limiting a platform to what a phone camera can actually capture, in real time, for six seconds, might be exactly what makes it worth watching.