Elon Musk has access to deleted Vine videos and will publish them soon

Elon Musk has announced that he has recovered the archive of original Vine videos that were thought to be lost and is working to restore user access through the X platform and the Grok Imagine chatbot. He hints that Vine will return as an AI service: "Grok Imagine is the AI Vine!". Currently, Grok Imagine allows generating short videos from a text description.

Cultural context

Vine is a predecessor of TikTok, a video service for short videos with a maximum duration of 6 seconds, which in 2012-2017 gathered more than 200 million users. The platform was closed due to competition from Instagram Stories and Snapchat. Back in 2022 and 2024, Musk conducted polls on X - 70% of users supported the return of Vine.

How it will work

The archive is coming back - users can repost their old Vine videos via X or use Grok Imagine to create AI versions. Grok Imagine is currently in beta - SuperGrok users ($30/month) have access to it, while others can sign up for a waiting list. The announcement is expected in August 2025; for now, beta access is available for a select few.

This is not a story about the return of the old Vine service, but about the use of old content as a means of engaging the audience and training AI services. This is a marketing ploy and inexpensive content for training neural models, but on the other hand, users can "get their 2015 back".